SharePoint Document & Content Management: The Foundation of a Compliant, Audit-Ready Quality Management System
A modern Quality Management System (QMS) is built on more than procedures and checklists — it depends on accurate documentation, controlled records, secure access, and complete visibility across compliance, risk, and improvement processes.
By integrating Microsoft SharePoint with Ostendo Operations (ERP), we deliver a powerful Document and Content Management platform that becomes the central knowledge base for your entire Quality Management System.
This ensures your organisation always has the right information, available to the right people, at the right time — with full compliance and audit control.
Centralised Document Management for Compliance and Control
SharePoint provides a secure, structured, and scalable environment to maintain all documents and records required for regulatory and industry compliance, including:
- Compliance documents
- Regulatory documents
- Industry best practice standards
- Controlled documents
- Policies, procedures, and work instructions
Advanced Records Management features ensure:
- Defined retention policies
- Full version control
- Complete audit trails
- Controlled document lifecycles from creation through to archiving
Sensitive and compliance-critical documents can be restricted by role-based access, ensuring only authorised personnel can view or edit content.
Smart Metadata, Fast Search, and Secure Online Access
To prevent documents becoming lost in digital filing cabinets, SharePoint enables you to:
- Enforce metadata standards for consistent document classification
- Quickly search and locate documents across your entire quality library
- Make documents securely available online to those who need them
- Control access based on user permissions, roles, and responsibilities
This dramatically improves productivity, reduces compliance risk, and ensures everyone always works from the latest approved version.
Stakeholder and Organisational Knowledge Management
SharePoint supports both internal and external stakeholder management, including:
- Organisation details
- Department structures
- Contact information
- Linked management processes
This creates a living knowledge base that supports collaboration, accountability, and regulatory transparency.
The Framework of Your Quality Management System
SharePoint becomes the structured backbone that supports and documents the full QMS framework, including:
- Regulatory compliance requirements
- Industry compliance requirements
- Regulatory and industry standards
- Quality policy
- Strategy and planning
- Operational processes
- SWOT analysis of QMS capabilities
- Process flows
- Risk management frameworks
Everything is centrally stored, version controlled, and audit-ready.
Enterprise Risk Management Fully Integrated with Quality
Effective Quality Management requires proactive risk control. SharePoint supports full Enterprise Risk Management, enabling you to:
- Create and manage Risk Profiles
- Identify risks across any area of the business, including:
- Health & Safety
- Production
- Machinery and equipment
- Sites and facilities
- Reputation
- Financial operations
- Motor vehicles and logistics
- Analyse the likelihood of risks occurring
- Categorise the severity of risks
- Define controls to mitigate each risk
- Log incidents, including:
- Health & Safety
- Vehicle incidents
- Financial events
- Production issues
- Machinery breakdowns
Incident planning, policy, and procedures are documented and enforced within the same controlled environment.
Continuous Improvement Driven by the PDCA Cycle
SharePoint fully supports Continuous Improvement using the Plan–Do–Check–Act (PDCA) cycle, ensuring quality never stands still.
Key Continuous Improvement features include:
- Quality KPIs and objectives aligned to regulations, policy, and strategy
- Non-Conformances — identification of non-conforming attributes or activities
- Corrective and Preventive Actions (CAPA) to eliminate root causes
- Opportunities for improvement, including marketing and reputation gains
- Management reviews for internal performance checking
- Audits, including:
- Compliance audits
- Industry audits
- Internal audits
- Historical audit result tracking
- Audit question libraries for consistent and repeatable audits
- Training courses linked to compliance and competency requirements
Each PDCA cycle feeds directly into the next — ensuring measurable, continuous improvement across the organisation.
Asset and Equipment Management for Compliance and Reliability
SharePoint also supports standards-based Asset and Equipment Management, ensuring:
- Machinery and equipment meet all required standards
- Calibration of measurement equipment is controlled and documented
- Service and maintenance plans are enforced
- Complete compliance history is maintained for audits and inspections
This ensures your assets remain safe, compliant, and operational at all times.
SharePoint + Ostendo: One Integrated Quality Knowledge Platform
By integrating SharePoint Document and Content Management with Ostendo Continuum (ERP), your organisation gains:
- A single, controlled source of truth for quality documentation
- End-to-end compliance visibility
- Stronger audit readiness
- Proactive risk management
- Structured continuous improvement
- Secure collaboration with internal and external stakeholders
Instead of quality information being scattered across folders, emails, and disconnected systems, everything is centrally controlled, searchable, secure, and fully integrated into your operational environment.