Review Date in Document Management

What would it mean to you, when is it set, and by whom? It might seem odd to you, but I cannot remember anyone asking this question in the ~25 years I have worked with IFS Document Management, so it's not a common thing.

Is this perhaps about approval of the document? We have that, in two ways, the approval status as well as an optional approval routing (list of steps to be approved). If approval is not what you mean, perhaps you can have a review step under Approval on the document?

We have a policy within our company that our SOP’s be reviewed annually by the responsible person to confirm accuracy.  Right now, it is just done by Outlook reminders. 

Hi @TTRACY,

For this you can use the standard functionality Approval Template. The approval also gives you the review date:

I hope this will help you.

Hi @TTRACY,

I just want to acknowledge your requirement as relevant in scenarios related to keeping documentation and procedures up to date and/or certified.

The suggested solution with Approval routing and its “Approval date” will maybe give a base from when to start counting down to the next renewal/review/approval in some way. But then perhaps the Release date would give a more precise date since there could be several approval steps, and the date of release may more significantly indicate from which date the document is valid.

Nevertheless - and regardless of which date field you choose to use as base for your starting point - there is no standard functionality (menu, page etc.) to use to keep track of, or trigger any action, when the day of a necessary renewal is reached.

The only way I see is to use a configuration. Could be a background job performing an action (send e-mail?), a lobby presenting outdated documents, a searchable custom field etc.
As a component to build such a solution on you could consider using the field “Days to Expiration” found on the Development tab on the Document Revision page. This field can be set in Basic Data (per class if needed) as a Default value.
I have not set up such a solution (yet), but just wanted to share my thoughts :)

Good luck!
/Erik

I know of a company that is doing this through a configuration they developed. Testing my memory, but I seem to recall it consisted of:

• a custom list on the Document Revision called Review Cycle which the document owner assigned at release. The values in the list were something like 1-year, 2-year, 5-year, and maybe a Never. I think they might have also had a configuration to guarantee a Review Cycle value was assigned before a document revision could be released.
• a custom field on the Document Revision called Next Review Date. This date was calculated at document release by adding the number of days in the Review Cycle (i.e., 365, 730, etc.) to the date the revision was released, but only for review cycles that were not equal to Never.
• a lobby element that showed all document revisions by class where Next Review Date was <= ‘X’ days from today.