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Simplify and Reduce Duplication of Information to Avoid Errors
| by Don Reed |
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| Posted in Business Improvement Services, ISO Quality Standards Tags: operational improvement, QMS | |||||
Information is important. It helps us do our job. But in how many places does information need to be kept? We need to make sure the right information is available to people when they need it, but sometimes we put information in too many places - where it is not really necessary and not really used. We just do it because it seems like a good idea at the time, or it makes things look official, or because we are just over-doing it.
When information is dynamic, you need to consolidate it as much as possible, because if the information is unnecessarily duplicated in a number of places, then every time it changes you have to locate everywhere the information exists and update it. This leads to oversights and errors, which then leads to outdated or incorrect information floating around.
We encountered this recently on some of our document lists that included revision level and revision date. We use these lists for document control. For example, we have a list of work instructions in the master work instruction file, so that when a work instruction is updated, we know where “deployed” copies of the work instructions are kept so they can be replaced with the latest revision.
And we like to have living documents, meaning we update them frequently. But every time, say, a work instruction is updated, the list had to be updated too.  Sometimes it wasn’t. So now the list had wrong information.
But the point is that it was unnecessary to have revision information on the list. We do not use the list to track revisions, we use it to track location (which rarely changed). Why have revision information there?  It is an unnecessary duplication of information.
We took the revision information off, and made updating work instructions (and other documents) easier because there is less overhead activity associated with it. And less wrong information floating around.
Bizmanualz has been at the forefront of deploying business best practices since 1995 delivering Policies, Procedures and Forms; quality systems implementation; and strategic business process improvement to help business owners achieve the growth and expansion they envision.
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Originally published in 2009 by Bizmanualz, Inc. under the title Simplify and Reduce Duplication of Information to Avoid Errors. All rights reserved. Reproduction permitted with attribution only. www.bizmanualz.com
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