DocuWare - DMS in Manufacturing

DocuWare is a document management system for capturing, filing, approving and archiving business and technical records. Inspection reports, drawings, certificates, contracts and invoices sit in one central archive, indexed and moved through defined workflows. It runs in the cloud or on your own hardware.

Headcount is the wrong yardstick. What decides it is the number of document types and approval stages. If material certificates, drawing revisions, supplier approvals and maintenance records have to be kept across several departments or plants, and audits come round regularly, the case usually rests on search time and duplicate filing avoided. With a handful of document types and one approver, a clean folder structure will do.

The price has three parts: user licences, the chosen feature package with its storage and document quota, and the one-off setup for file structure, workflows and interfaces. Cloud licensing runs as a subscription per user per month, on-premises as a purchase with an annual maintenance contract. Quotes are issued in US dollars or the currency used in your region.

User count rarely drives the figure. Document types, the complexity of approval routes and the ERP connection matter more. We put a firm number on it once processes and system landscape are settled.

reinstil is an authorized DocuWare reseller, so the licence comes from us together with the implementation. One contract, one contact, no intermediary margin stacked on top.

The practical difference shows up after go-live. Where licence and implementation sit with separate companies, every configuration question turns into a question of responsibility. Here the party that sold the licence is the party that built the workflows.

Cloud is quicker to start and takes day-to-day operation off your IT team. On-premises stays the choice where internal policy, national data rules or customer contracts require the archive to sit inside your own network. Feature scope is the same in both, and a later switch is possible.

DocuWare Cloud runs on Microsoft Azure and is offered from several regional locations. The region is fixed when the tenant is created and does not move afterwards, so it is worth settling before the contract. We confirm the regions currently available for your country in writing, since the list changes.

Where no suitable region exists, or where a regulator or customer requires the data to stay inside the country, the route is an on-premises installation in your own data centre or with a local hosting provider. Same software, same feature scope.

Implementation and support run in English or German, remotely, from our office in Mainz. Most of the work happens through screen sharing and scheduled sessions, which makes the physical distance largely irrelevant. On-site visits are arranged where a rollout warrants them.

Time zones are the real constraint. For plants in the Americas or the Gulf, we agree fixed overlap windows at project start rather than promising round-the-clock coverage we cannot staff.

A filed document can no longer be changed or deleted unnoticed. Every edit creates a new version, every access is logged, retention periods run in the system. During an inspection you can demonstrate that the document presented matches the one that originally arrived.

What has to be kept, and for how long, is set by the law of the country you operate in and by the standards your industry works to. Those rules differ; the mechanism that proves integrity does not.

Clause 7.5 of ISO 9001 requires documented information to be identified, reviewed, approved, distributed and controlled in its revision status. DocuWare covers exactly that: approval workflow with defined roles, unambiguous version status, marking of obsolete versions, controlled access and a logged change history. The same mechanics carry ISO 45001, ISO 14001 and ISO 27001, which impose comparable document control requirements.

IATF 16949 adds retention. Production part approvals, tooling records and inspection records have to be kept for the length of the production run plus at least one calendar year. Periods like these are set per document type. What gets certified is never the software, only the process it carries.

Three sources set the period, and they rarely agree. Commercial and tax law fixes the floor for anything with a financial trail, commonly between three and ten years depending on the country. Product and machinery regulation adds a term tied to when the equipment went on the market, ten years in several major markets. Operating rules for pressure vessels, lifting gear and other regulated plant keep inspection evidence available at least until the next scheduled inspection, in practice across the whole service life.

The third source is usually the longest: customer contracts and industry standards. Automotive and aerospace supply agreements regularly ask for the life of the part plus a margin. Retention therefore follows the document type, not one blanket number, and in DocuWare it is set per document type and runs automatically.

Rules for electronic records and signatures in pharmaceutical, medical device and food production follow one pattern worldwide, whether they come from FDA 21 CFR Part 11, EU GMP Annex 11 or a national equivalent: identified users, a secure and independent audit trail, controlled versions, and signatures bound to the record they approve. DocuWare supplies those building blocks, including approval workflows and integration with electronic signature services.

Compliance itself comes from validating the configured system against your own requirements, not from installing software. That validation is project work, and the qualification documents are part of what we deliver.

Acceptance protocols, material test certificates such as mill test reports or EN 10204 certificates, calibration records, supplier approvals, maintenance records, and the conformity pack for whichever market the equipment went to. Drawings sit in the archive with version and approval status. Retrieval runs via asset number, year of manufacture, plant or supplier.

Forklift and crane licences, welding qualifications, first aid certificates and safety briefings are filed with an expiry date as an index value. DocuWare sends a reminder before a qualification lapses, to the supervisor as well as the employee, so nobody discovers the gap during an audit.

The same structure covers personnel files for staff without a PC workstation, and contractor documentation, which typically causes more trouble than the permanent workforce because the paperwork arrives from outside.

PLM and CAD data management look after the product: assemblies, bills of material, native design data and their dependencies. DocuWare looks after the documents around the product and its operation, meaning certificates, inspection reports, supplier paperwork, contracts, invoices and service files.

The two are not alternatives. The usual pattern is that released drawings leave PLM as neutral PDFs and land in DocuWare, where purchasing, quality, production and service reach them without needing a CAD seat.

Yes. Every processing step is logged with user, timestamp and action, read access included. The history can be exported per document, which helps in certification audits as much as in questions from IT, legal or employee representatives.

The time sink before an audit is rarely the audit itself, it is collecting the evidence. With certificates, inspection reports, training records and approvals in the same archive, the audit file becomes a search query instead of a week of work. Proof of document control falls out as a by-product, because approval and change history are logged anyway.

External parties get read access to a clearly bounded selection, controlled through roles and index values. An auditor then sees every inspection certificate for one asset, but no personnel files. For single documents you can generate time-limited share links that expire on their own. Every external access appears in the log.

One archive can hold several file cabinets with their own structures, permissions and retention rules. A plant in Ohio and a plant in Dubai keep the periods their own regulators require, while corporate quality still searches across both. The interface ships in a range of languages and each user picks their own, independently of the language a document is written in.

One decision to make early: index fields need a single working language, usually English. Mixed field naming across sites is the fastest way to lose cross-plant search.

Access runs through the browser, so shop floor terminals, tablets and industrial PCs at the line work too. A barcode scanner at the workstation pulls up the matching file directly, without a search mask. Permissions can be set so that a terminal only shows the documents belonging to its own line.

One limitation to note: DocuWare is an online system and needs a connection. Where the shop floor has no stable network, capture happens offline and syncs later, which is what flowdit is built for.

Ready-made connectors exist for common systems, among them SAP and Microsoft Dynamics, along with interfaces to standard accounting packages. Smart Connect places document access inside existing screens, which also covers industry-specific systems that bring no interface of their own. Anything beyond that is built over the REST API as part of the DocuWare implementation.

Commissioning produces the densest paperwork of any project phase: punch lists, test protocols, sign-offs, as-built drawings and supplier certificates, all of it generated under time pressure and all of it needed years later. Filed against the asset as it is produced, the handover package assembles itself instead of being reconstructed at the end.

Contractors, the operator and the client can each be given access to the part that concerns them, which removes the round of emailing zip files that usually closes a project.

Holdings from file shares, legacy archives or a system being replaced are migrated and indexed on the way in. How cleanly that works depends on the structure of the old data. We test it on a sample before anyone signs off a migration budget.

A clearly bounded process such as incoming invoices goes live within a few weeks. Several departments, many document types and complex interfaces together turn it into a project running over several months. Stepwise rollout beats the big bang.

flowdit runs the execution: inspections, checks, maintenance and acceptances are worked through on a mobile device, with photos, readings and signature, offline if needed. DocuWare manages the documents around them across their full retention period. One produces the evidence, the other keeps it.

Either system works on its own. Together they pay off where inspection records form part of a longer chain of evidence, as in asset documentation or customer acceptance.

Once an inspection is closed, flowdit generates the report as a PDF. The flowdit DocuWare integration passes work order, asset, batch and date as index values, so the report attaches to the right file in the archive without manual filing. The interface is configured by reinstil; no development work is required on your side.