ISO question?

I assume you are talking about ISO9000. I believe it requires that documentation be available for everyone who is involved in that "process". If you write your process guideline such that the electrical drawings are part of it you need the drawings. After a couple years of being the ISO9000 guy in my location I figured out it means whatever you say it means. Basically you just need to show that you have a documented procedure in place for every process and that you can show someone how you do your documented procedure. In retrospect I think it was just a plot to make outsourcing easier. Be sure you leave some key elements of your job out, why make it easier for them? ;-)

Agreed

Sounds like they do not understand the ISO procedures. Typical for MBA's. No offense to those who might have an MBA. My experience has shown that MBA's may know the bottom line but they have little in common with us grunts that actually keep the place running.

If the front office maroons want to control everything then start calling them in on weekends an from vacation to get the drawings. Counter with scanning all of the documents into one place with read access only for everyone but the sys admin. Solves the problem of multiple copies.

When an update needs to be done on a drawing or procedure have the admin change the files. I worked for an OEM with 25K employees. We had directories on the servers that actually said "C:/OEM file (DO NOT DELETE)" I was floored that we the indians had full control over some of these files. I had an directory that was ~3 terabytes. All compressed but very relevant data. I had one file deleted because the front office maroon did not know the difference between "copy" and "move". I applied for and received ownership of the directory with read only access for all others. It was a great source for all to use, I was just not going to risk that someone would forget and hold down the shift key when looking at a document.

Yeah, like I wired this air conditioning unit and the drawing had every conceivable configuration on one page. No one could read it and I just took the best guess. Do those drones think we are going to call them? Hell no, we will do it even if it burns up.

There is a requirement that a single master copy be kept, but there is no requirement that it be the only copy.

In other words, if you make changes to a piece of equipment you have to revise the master drawing, in what ever way your procedures tell you to do so.

thanks for the info guys....i figured there should be a master copy of prints and infomation for equiptment....and there could be copies made for different locations.....just BS management is keeping our maintenance guys in the dark on.....thanks again

It's total rubbish to say that there should be only one copy.

Specifically, ISO9001:2000 contains a requirement that: "4.2.3 Documents required by the quality management system shall be controlled...

...A documented procedure shall be established to define the controls needed (a) to approve documents... (b) to review and update as necessary... ... (d) to ensure that relevant versions of applicable documents are available AT POINTS OF USE...