When it comes to conversations on safety, the focus usually steers towards what’s visible – personal protective equipment (PPE), training, checklists and the like. The real test of your commitment to safety? That lives in something much less tangible: your control over information. How you manage engineering documents, procedures and drawings plays a critical role.
When your files and information are scattered across contractor-owned systems, you’re exposed to hidden risks. Updates can get lost. Approvals may stall. Should a crisis arise, you and your team may find yourselves wasting time searching for documents instead of being able to take swift action.
What you can, and should, do to maintain safety is mandate a single, centralized engineering document management system (EDMS) with all partners and suppliers. With this you can enforce process discipline, ensure reliable handovers and provide responders with immediate access to critical information. A unified EDMS can do more for you than just standardize workflows. It bolsters the culture of care that safety depends on.
Document integrity must be a non-negotiable to maintain both compliance and trust. In this article, we discuss critical safety challenges that arise when you don’t control document management during a project, including real world examples of resulting catastrophes. Keep reading for more on how a mandated EDMS platform brings safety and information integrity together to resolve risks and steps to implement that in your contracts.
Related Read: What Is Document Control? Why Is It Important?
The Problem: When Partners Control Their Own Systems, Safety Gaps Appear
Misaligned information may not cause your safety to fail in one fell swoop, but it will quietly erode it, with potentially catastrophic results when you least expect it. If every contractor, partner and supplier has their own document systems, the resulting data fragmentation directly undermines your ability to protect your people and assets.
Fragmented document management breaks down safety by:
- Creating Version Conflicts: Multiple parties working from different versions of a drawing or procedure can lead to major hazards, even if discrepancies are small.
- Causing Incomplete Handovers: Unclear ownership leads to missing documentation between project phases, leaving operators to inherit unknown risks and poor safety baselines.
- Allowing Uncontrolled Updates: Changes without formal review or notification make safety procedures unreliable. For example, just one undocumented update can mean teams are following obsolete instructions in a high-risk environment.
- Blocking Emergency Access: Scattered systems where information is hard to find and potentially inaccurate delay action which amplifies the harm that can be done during a single incident.
The Catastrophic Risks of Fragmented Systems
When you don’t have document control and information is not unified through a single platform, it can lead to serious and even fatal outcomes. Here are two examples.
Grenfell Tower
In the summer of 2017, Grenfell Tower in London caught fire resulting in 72 fatalities. Multiple parties supplied, modified and relied on product data, test results and design choices that were inconsistent, misleading or not fully shared. The inquiry into the incident uncovered that suppliers and installers misrepresented product safety. On top of this, the building owner and contractors failed to manage and verify critical fire-safety documentation and changes during refurbishment. These critical errors led to the fire.
Mexico City Metro Line 12
On May 3, 2021, the Mexico City Metro Line 12 experienced a tragic incident when a girder overpass collapsed as the train was passing over it. The result was 26 fatalities with nearly 100 injured. Technical reviews uncovered construction defects, poor inspection and maintenance records as well as disagreements over methodology and findings between city authorities and contracted partners and consultants. The withholding of findings, disputes over reports and contract supervision failures show uncontrolled documentation and contested ownership of investigation outputs impede not only accountability but safe, corrective action.
Case Study: Enabling the Asset Management Processes at London Gatwick Airport to Truly Take Off
The Solution: A Mandated EDMS Platform
You can’t truly take safety seriously without requiring a single, centralized EDMS. To address siloed and disconnected document control, mandate that all external partners, suppliers and contractors involved in a project use an EDMS platform of your choice. Requiring that everyone work within one centralized platform helps you eliminate ambiguity and implement a single, auditable standard for document integrity.
A mandated EDMS means everyone has access to all necessary engineering files in one controlled environment. It creates a single source of truth to standardize document control, so version history, approval workflows and metadata remain consistent. The result is a system that protects:
- Safety: Workers and responders always have access to the latest, verified information, so there’s no delay or uncertainty in an emergency, only trusted data that can guide immediate actions.
- Governance: Mandated use creates traceability where every change is logged, every approval recorded and every handover documented in one place to form a verifiable audit trail that meets regulatory requirements.
- Compliance: Standardized workflows enforce alignment with International Organization for Standardization (ISO), Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and industry-specific documentation requirements, which reduces your exposure to noncompliance penalties and reputational risks.
The Link Between Information Integrity and Safety
A mandated EDMS isn’t simply a policy choice. It makes your organization accountable and many high hazard industries recognize this. For example, in oil and gas, operators require contractors to upload all controlled drawings into a shared EDMS before work can even begin. In power generation, plant owners enforce document control standards with contractual EDMS clauses as a means of preventing unverified updates. The pharmaceutical and manufacturing sectors are also adopting a mandated EDMS model so the same system that governs quality is also governing safety procedures.
A Quick Guide to Embedding a Mandated EDMS into Contracts
Making a mandated EDMS part of your contractual agreement with third-party providers requires clear language and expectations, so all obligations are understood from the get go. Here are six steps to help get you started:
- Specify the EDMS Platform: Clearly state the required EDMS platform that will be used for document management, including specific versions, so there is consistency across the project lifecycle. Cloud EDMS platforms are easier to share than on-premises and eliminate the need to specify software version numbers.
- Define Document Types and Scope: Detail the document categories that need to be stored in the EDMS, such as engineering drawings, safety protocols and updates. This will ensure alignment on what is critical for safety and compliance.
- Establish Access Control and Permissions: Define who can access, modify or approve documents and specify the need for permissions to be controlled and tracked through your EDMS to maintain consistency and integrity.
- Set Documentation and Revision Standards: Outline your requirements for version control, including approval workflows, revision histories and timely document uploads. This way you get real-time updates and prevent outdated or conflicting versions from circulating. You’ll want an EDMS that lets you generate unique document numbers on demand and automatically notify and retrieve new documents for editing once created.
- Enforce Compliance with Audit Trails: Require that all document activity, from creation through updates to completion, be logged within your EDMS for traceability and auditing.
- Define Handover Requirements: Set guidelines for how documentation handover needs to be managed between third parties and project phases, so nothing is missed or delayed during transitions.
Related Read: 5 Trends Shaping the Future of Document Intelligence
The Next Step: Make the Move to a Modernized, Integrated Approach
Implementing a mandated EDMS into your project contracts serves as a powerful cultural signal for your organization. When document integrity is approached the same way as PPE it’s a clear message that safety strategies protect people and assets just as much as compliance.
Making document control non-negotiable in your contracts with third-party providers means creating a culture where the integrity of your information is just as fundamental to operations as hard hats and safety boots. When you lead with a contractual, mandated EDMS it creates an environment where safety is a shared responsibility with external parties and an inherent piece of the process.
Find out how mandated EDMS can strengthen your organization’s safety culture. Contact us for a consultation today.
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