Document Control
Controlled procedures with an owner, a version history, a signed approval and a record of who has actually read them.
The problem it solves
Everyone has the procedure. Nobody has the same one.
Controlled documents are where audit theatre is most obvious. The approved procedure lives in a shared drive next to four near-identical copies, one of which has "FINAL" in the filename and none of which is the one people on the floor are working from. Approval was an email. The review that was due last March happened, probably, but there's nothing to show for it.
Okuda makes the register the single answer to "which version is current, who owns it, who approved it, and who has read it" — and makes each of those answers evidence rather than recollection.
Who it's for
Anyone who has to say "that's the current version" and mean it.
Quality managers and operations leads at SMEs running a documented management system — procedures, policies, work instructions, forms — who need control over them to be demonstrable, not just intended.
What it does
Six capabilities, built to hold up under scrutiny.
A controlled register
Every document has a code, a category, an owning role and a status — Draft, In review, Approved, Published or Obsolete. There is one current version, and the register says which it is.
Real version history
Each version is uploaded and kept, not overwritten. Superseding a document doesn't erase what came before it, so you can show what was in force on any given date.
Signed approval, not an email
Submitting for review launches a real approval process: a review step, then a decision step that requires an electronic signature. Publication is the signed decision — there's no manual gap where someone could publish an unapproved version.
Read and acknowledge
Track who has acknowledged the current version, and who hasn't. "We circulated it" stops being the answer to whether your people have read the procedure they're working to.
Scheduled review
Set a review interval per document and Okuda tracks the next date and raises it when it falls due, rather than leaving periodic review to whoever remembers.
Audit trail, retention and obsolescence
Every event — created, uploaded, submitted, returned, approved, published, acknowledged, made obsolete — is logged and can't be edited after the fact. Retention rules purge old versions on a schedule; obsolete documents are marked, not quietly deleted.
What it isn't
It is not a document management system.
This is a controlled document register, and that scope is deliberate. It is not a general file store, it is not full-text search across everything your business has ever written, and it is not somewhere to put the marketing folder. Keep SharePoint for that. Okuda controls the documents that have to be controlled, and does that part properly.
If it isn't versioned, owned and traceable, it doesn't count.
See Document Control against your own procedures.