Two separate sources
The documents an organisation must keep arrive along two paths:
- From the standard — the outputs of a voluntarily adopted system standard.
- From the law — documents that arise by statute according to activity, hazard class and headcount.
Confusing them produces errors in both directions: treating a standard's output as law creates unnecessary work; treating a statutory document as voluntary leaves work undone.
Outputs of the harmonised structure
The outputs that arise from the shared structure and serve all four ISO standards are held in Optifora's data layer as shared document types:
| Clause | Output |
|---|---|
| 4.3 | Management system scope |
| 5.2 | Policy |
| 6.1 · 6.1.3 | Actions for risks and opportunities · compliance obligations |
| 6.2 | Objectives and plans |
| 7.2 · 7.4 · 7.5 | Competence evidence · communication records · control of documented information |
| 9.1 · 9.2 · 9.3 | Monitoring and measurement · internal audit programme and report · review outputs |
| 10.1 | Nonconformity and corrective action |
The numbers
The data layer currently defines 33 document types and 53 relations binding them to standards. That a document type can bind to more than one standard is what integration looks like in data.
Document count is not a target
"How many documents should I keep" has no single right answer; the right question is "which requirement is met by which evidence". A document that matches no requirement only takes up shelf space.