Your first week in ClearVue

This is a tutorial: a guided path with a known destination. You will end the week with one real procedure under revision control, an approval chain that routes to real people, and an audit trail an assessor can read.

It is deliberately not a reference. It shows one way through, not every option. When you want the full set of choices for a step, follow the link at the end of that step.

Who this is for — and which role you need

The person who will own the quality system day to day.

You need the Admin role to do the document work in this tutorial. The QualityManager role does not currently carry document permissions — a Quality Manager cannot open the document library. That surprises people, so check which role you hold before you start.

Managers (Manager role) get read-only document access. Everything else in the quality system — audits, inspections, training, CAPA — is the Quality Manager’s, and does not need Admin.

Before you start

You need three things, and gathering them is genuinely most of the work:

• Your organisation structure. ClearVue models Company → Division → Region → Location. Sketch yours on paper first. Changing it later is possible but it re-scopes every document you have already filed.
• One real procedure. Not a test document. Pick something small and real — a work instruction you actually maintain. Test documents teach you nothing about whether the workflow fits how your plant behaves.
• Two named approvers. Real people who will actually click approve. A workflow that routes to a placeholder never surfaces the problem you are trying to find this week.

1. Confirm your organisation structure

   Everything in ClearVue is scoped to somewhere in the org hierarchy. A document filed at Division level is visible to every Location under it; one filed at a Location is not visible to its siblings.

   Get this right before you upload anything. The most common first-week mistake is filing everything at Company level because it is the default — which quietly grants every plant visibility of every other plant’s procedures.

2. Upload one procedure as a draft

   A new document starts in Draft, and so does each revision you upload to it. Draft means exactly what it says: not part of the controlled record, and not valid for use on the floor. Nothing you do to a draft has compliance consequences, which makes it the right place to experiment.

3. Build the approval chain you actually use

   Resist the urge to model the approval process you wish you had. Model the one that happens today, then improve it once people are inside the system.

   An approval chain that mirrors reality gets used. An idealised one gets worked around, and the workaround is what the auditor finds.

4. Submit it and watch it route

   You submit a revision, not the document, and the control lives on the revision row under Edit → Files — not on the document page. The revision moves from Draft to Under review. See Submit a revision for review for the full procedure, because this one is genuinely hard to find.

   This is the step where you learn whether your approvers will actually respond. Time it. If the first approval takes four days, that is data about your process, not about ClearVue.

5. Set the effective date deliberately

   Approved is a revision state — the signatures have landed. The Effective date is a separate field on the document saying when it starts to apply. They are not the same thing and they can differ.

   The gap between them is where you train people on the change. Setting effective dates to “today” as a habit removes your only window for communicating a change before it binds. See Document and revision states.

6. Read your own audit trail

   Open the revisions table and read it as an assessor would. Can you tell who approved what, when, why (the change record — ISO 9001 §7.5.3), and which version was in force on any given date?

   If you can answer that for one document in week one, the system will answer it for a thousand documents in year two. That is the whole proposition.

What you should have at the end

• One document Active, with an approved revision and an effective date behind it.
• A revision history that reads as evidence without needing explanation.
• A realistic sense of your own approval turnaround time.

Where to go next

Repeat the cycle with a second document and change something — supersede revision A with revision B. The supersession behaviour is what most people find surprising, and it is much better to find it surprising in week one with two documents than in month six with two hundred.