Quality documents

A quality document is a controlled procedure: an SOP or work instruction that your team writes once, publishes, and revises under control. Think "Incoming Inspection Procedure" or "Solder Reflow Work Instruction". Each document carries an ordered list of steps (a mix of tasks, measurements, checkboxes, and sign-offs) plus a rich-text body, and it moves through a small lifecycle before anyone treats it as authoritative.

The point of controlling it is auditability: you never overwrite a live procedure in place. Publishing a new revision creates a new version and archives the one it replaces, so the old text is still there to point an auditor at.

The lifecycle

A quality document has exactly three states, and only one version of a given document is ever Active at a time.

You publish from the document header. The button reads "Publish" for a Draft, "Reactivate" for an Archived version, and "Submit for approval" when an approval rule covers quality documents (more on that below). All three drive the status toward Active.

Archiving or reverting to Draft is available too, but reverting a version that has a pending approval request is restricted: only the person who requested it or a designated approver can pull it back to Draft.

Versioning

Versions are the heart of the "controlled" part. A document is identified by its name, and each revision is a separate row stamped with a version number (starting at 0). The name is unique per version, so "Incoming Inspection Procedure" can exist at V0, V1, and V2 side by side.

To revise a published document, open the Versions menu in the header and choose New Version. Carbon copies the current document's body, steps, and tags into a fresh Draft at the next version number. Nothing about the old version changes. When you publish the new one, the trigger archives the previous Active version. The prior revision is never deleted, so the version history stays intact for audit.

The header's Versions dropdown lists every revision of the document with its version badge and status, so you can jump between them and read a retired revision without reactivating it.

Approval

Whether publishing needs a sign-off depends on your company's approval rules. Quality documents are one of the document types the shared approval engine covers.

• No approval rule — the Publish button flips the document straight to Active.
• An approval rule applies — the button reads Submit for approval and creating an approval request instead of going Active. A qualified approver then sees Approve / Reject in the header. On Approve, the document transitions to Active in one transaction; the approvers are notified when the request is raised.

Only one pending approval request exists per document at a time, and submitting an Archived version for approval moves it back to Draft while the request is open.

Steps

Each document holds an ordered set of steps, the same step model Carbon uses for a procedure on a job. A step has a name, an optional description, a sort order, and a type that decides what gets recorded when someone runs the document:

A Measurement step must name a unit of measure and can set a min/max range; a List step must supply its options. These constraints are enforced when you save the step.

What a quality document is not

Quality documents are standalone controlled records. They are not attached to a specific process, item, or inspection through a link on the document itself, and they are distinct from two neighbors people often conflate:

• A procedure is the versioned work instruction that gets copied onto a job's operation to give it steps and run parameters. It shares the step model with a quality document but lives in the production method, not the quality library.
• An inspection document is a ballooned drawing used for first-article and in-process dimensional inspection. That is a separate feature with its own tables.

For the wider quality module (issues, dispositions, inbound inspection), see Quality.