How to publish your QMS on your Intranet
	holding records

chapter contents list

• introduction
• keep documents and records separate
• using templates
• integrating the QMS with your IT
• get to your IT from links in your QMS documents
• make your QMS the "help pages" of your IT system

introduction

"Holding records" is primarily about IT and data processing. This book is not, strictly, about IT, but there are some useful points to be made nonetheless.

keep documents and records separate

"Documents", in this context, are used to describe the QMS. They are the descriptions of policies, the procedures, the work instructions, and so on, which describe how the QMS works. "Records" are the means of recording data about your business. They are minutes of meetings, job tickets, test records, signatures to show that a review has been done, and so on.

It is desirable to keep documents and records separate from each other, because they are different types of object, usually with different owners, with different retention requirements. From a system design viewpoint, it is clear that this is desirable, although it is not always easy to explain why this is so. However, as a general working principle, it is recommended.

using templates

By "template" we mean a model for a record. For example, you could have a template of a form, ready to be filled in. That empty form would be a template.

You should hold all your forms as templates in your QMS. If you use hyperlinks, you can link to the form from where it is referenced in your documentation.

There should be some way in which the user can open the form, and then save it where he needs it for holding records. Usually, it is quite straightforward to arrange this.

If you use templates, you can document some of your QMS on the templates themselves. There are several ways of doing this.

• If your template is for a record which is to be word-processed (for example: if it is to be a report or minutes), you can insert instructions in the minutes-to-be where real text is to go later. So, you might insert instruction bracketed using chevrons (that is < and >). You tell your users that all such text is to be replaced.
  Here is an example (in .rtf format).
  If your word processing program can't read it, here is an example (in .html format).
• If your template is a form, then you can document some of your QMS as notes on the form. If you do this, you don't need to include the same information elsewhere in the QMS.
  The benefit to this, is that the information is where the users will be able to use it.
  Clearly, you don't want to clutter up your form with masses of procedural information; you have to find the right balance between information and clutter.
• It is often useful to provide navigation from the QMS procedure documents to the templates by using hyperlinks.
  This is one of the benefits of a hyperlinked system - access to form templates is quick and simple.
• If you use templates, it can be useful to provide instructions, as notes on the template, on where to file the records.
  As usual, such notes can be within chevrons with instructions to the user to delete them.

integrating the QMS with your IT

The QMS describes how your management system works; the IT system implements part of your management system. To that extent, QMS and IT are different sides of the same coin. It seems that it would be desirable to have the two integrated in some way.

In essence, there are two ways of doing this. In practice, you might have a combination of the two, but let's keep it simple to start with.

1. You can get to your IT from links in your QMS documents.
2. You can make your QMS the "help pages" of your IT system.

get to your IT from links in your QMS documents

It's not easy to generalise this; it rather depends on what operating system you use, and on how you have implemented your IT. Essentially, you need to use some sort of hyperlink.

To take a simple example, if you had a piece of IT implemented as a spreadsheet (for example: Microsoft Excel), you could write a link which said to the user "click here to register the next report number". The link underneath would be something like file:///filepath/ReportLog.xls. The "filepath" would be the actual file path to the Report Log. When the user clicks to register the next report number, he is presented with an Excel spreadsheet. He fills in the details on the next row, notes the new Report Number, and closes Excel. This is a very simple approach, and it's not very rigorous, but for many organisations it would suffice.

An alternative would be to write the IT application using JavaScript in the Web page itself. This can be done readily if you know JavaScript, but it is very limited in its application. Most limiting is that you can't read from or write to any files on the computer, so you can't store records; all you can do really is to calculate results and display them to the user.

In general, it is difficult, if not impossible, to get to the rest of your IT systems from your Web browser. The Web browser is intended to provide a secure environment, so that programs downloaded from the Web cannot get general access to your computer. Were this not the case, it would be very dangerous to run programs (of whose provenance you knew nothing) on your computer. They might change your files, send your private data to other people, and misbehave generally. This would not be acceptable. For this reason, you can't run your IT from your Web browser.

There is an exception to this: if your IT is run as an application from the Web browser. So, you could run applications from the browser on the server, using PHP for example.

make your QMS the "help pages" of your IT system

The inverse of this approach is to write your IT system, and when the user wants help, you display to him the relevant part of the QMS. How you do this depends on the programming language you are using and your operating system, but usually it is feasible, particularly if your QMS is written using html.

Java

If you are using Java as a programming language, the easiest approach is to use JavaHelp. This is a Java Package for this very purpose. It uses html code organised in a specific way for a help system. You can program it to provide context-sensitive help. That is, when you press the F1 key, you are taken to that part of the help documentation which is appropriate to what you were doing when you pressed the key.

Alternatively, you can call your Web browser from Java and pass it the url of the .htm document wherein lies the relevant help. This is much the same in effect as JavaHelp. This approach has the benefit that you can use your normal Web browser for viewing the help information; if you use JavaHelp, it comes with its own browser and this has fewer features than the normal Web browser. This is not a problem unless it lacks a feature you need; usually it doesn't.