Once a draft document has been reviewed (optional), the next step of the Document Lifecycle is to approve the document.
When drafting a document, authors will need to select at least one Quality User as an Approver. Additional, non-quality users can be added as approvers. These approvers are selected on the Properties of the document.
Send for Approval
There are two ways document authors can send a document for approval.
From the Document Workspace, select “Your Documents” and “For review” to filter for the document. Then check the box next to the correct document, and click the Send for approval button.
Open, or view a draft document, then click the Send for approval button.
Approve a Document
All listed approvers will be notified by email that a document is ready for their approval. It will be listed on their Dashboard under the “Your Actions” section. Alternatively, approvers can browse to the document from the Document Workspace by selecting “Your Actions” and “For approval”. Click on the document to open and view the document.
When viewing the document, approvers can view comments left during the review phase but cannot add comments.
Similar to reviewing a document, approvers can benefit from a “Review Checklist” documented in their Document Control policy. We’ve provided a checklist to help get you started here.
Once approvers have read through the document, and all comments, they can choose to either approve or decline the document by clicking the respective button in the top left corner. To complete the approve or decline process, they will enter their digital signature credentials with the option to leave a comment.
Any comments left when approving a document can be accessed by navigating to the document and selecting Reports → View change control. All Approvers and any comments made will be displayed in the Approvals section.
Once approved, the document owner will receive an email notification of the approval. If multiple approvers are listed, the document owner will be notified once the last approver has approved.
If an approver declines the approval, the document owner will be notified by email and will need to revert the document to draft, make edits to the document, then resend for review and/or approval as described in the Review a Document article.
Updating Approvers
Approvers can be adjusted when a document is in the For Approval or For Review status without reverting the document to a Draft. Quality users will see an option to “Manage approvers” while in either state. This option will allow you to add, remove, or replace approvers (Quality and Other).
If removing or replacing a current approver, a required field will appear to document a reason for removal/replacement. This comment will be captured in the audit trail.
Next Steps
Once a document has been approved by all listed approvers, the next step is subjective to your process and templates. Based on the document’s settings, found on the Properties tab, the document may be made effective immediately upon approval. This would be common for documents that don’t require training. If however, users will need to complete training prior to making the document Effective, then use the button below to learn more about training users on the new document.
Alternatively, if the new document must manually be made effective, click the button below for more information. Documents will need to be made effective before appearing in the Document Library.