When a shop drawing is revised after fabrication has started, three things must happen, and usually none of them do. The floor must stop working to the old revision. Every stamp already made must say which revision it was made to. And someone must work out what is stranded — cut profiles, ordered glass, panels already dispatched or installed. In most companies the revision arrives as a PDF in an email, the register is updated if there is one, and the factory finds out when a fitter notices the dimension is wrong. A good record holds the built-to revision on every production stamp, treats a superseded drawing as a stop instruction rather than a filing event, and keeps every revision as an appended row, never an overwrite. This guide is about what that record must contain.
Rev 03 is released and the zone enters fabrication. The consultant returns comments; engineering issues Rev 04, and the register — correctly — now shows Rev 04 as the current drawing. Nobody tells the saw operator, because the register does not talk to the floor. The zone moves into coating, then to inspection, then onto a truck, all against Rev 03. Weeks later the dispute begins: which revision was this built to? The only evidence is a stack of timestamps on three different lists and the memory of whoever was on shift. Reconstructing it takes a day and convinces no one.
The loss is rarely the drawing. It is the profiles already cut to Rev 03, the glass ordered to Rev 03 dimensions with a long lead time, and the zones sharing the same drawing number that nobody thought to check.
Each production stage stamp records the drawing number and revision it was performed to, at the moment it is made. Then "what was this built to?" is a lookup, not an investigation.
Issuing a new revision must change the state of every zone on that drawing so that the next floor move is refused until the new revision is approved and released. A superseded drawing that only changes a register row has changed nothing on the floor.
The old revision row is flagged superseded and kept, with the file, the actor and the time. The drawing number is minted once and kept across revisions; the revised file is mandatory. Nothing is overwritten, so the dispute above is answered from the record.
The release of a revision notifies production, and the notification is itself a record. "We sent it to the WhatsApp group" is not a record.
The list nobody makes: material already issued to the zone, orders placed to the old dimensions, sibling zones on the same drawing, zones already dispatched or installed. A good record identifies these; a good process at least walks the list by hand.