An audit room, day two. The auditor pulls out a completed form, signed, dated, filed neatly, and asks which procedure it comes from. Silence. Someone flips through the SOP index, another is quite sure it’s under purchasing, but it isn't...
A QMS orphan. Used every week, signed every week, but no parent SOP and nobody really owning it. Sometimes it’s the other way round, an SOP pointing to a form that disappeared two revisions ago.
How did it get there? Nobody planned it, that’s for sure. Usually it’s templates borrowed from a previous company, an SOP merged or split while the forms stayed put, a quick form to close an audit finding, someone leaving, or paper moving into an eQMS and the links not making the trip.
Does it matter, if the form is filled in properly? Ask the auditor
When we built an interactive map of a QMS, linking SOPs to forms, records and ISO clauses, that’s where it helped. On a list an orphan hides quite comfortably, on a map it’s a dot with nothing going in or out.
Housekeeping, mostly. Link both ways, have change control ask what else a revision touches, give every document an owner, retire the obsolete ones properly.
And that form? Found it eventually, in an old version of the purchasing SOP.
Of course, if this sounds familiar, and let us know if you like to know more about the interactive map.
