Effective documents are documents that have been completely reviewed and approved by your Quality Team and organization. You may think of these documents as “live” or “official”. They represent the policies and procedures that your organization is committed to upholding.

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. If however, the new document must manually be made effective, then any Quality User can do that at their discretion.

Similar to sending a document for review or approval, browse to the document from either the Document Workspace, or from the Dashboard under the “Your Actions” section.

Click the document to view/open, then click the Make effective button. You’ll then enter your digital signature and optional comments before clicking the Make effective button.

Alternatively, you can use the Document Workspace by selecting “Your Actions” and “Approved”, then select a single document to make effective. You’ll complete the process by adding your digital signature.

Effective documents can be viewed in the Document Library by any user with access. To restrict access to a document, you’ll need to implement a tagging strategy along with User Groups.

Quality teams and document authors will continue to interact with effective documents by adding tags, adding users for training, changing document ownership, and even retiring old documents. This is all within the scope of managing a “live” effective document.

As organizations change, so will their policies and procedures. Effective documents can be updated, or up/versioned at any time, but it is helpful to have a reminder for busy team members to periodically review their effective documents.