Traceline replaces shared drives and email chains with one place to request a change, route the resulting drawing through approval, and keep a record — change justification, e-signed approvals, redlines, every revision in between — your AS9100 auditor can actually follow.
Drawings scattered across shared drives, email threads, and someone's desktop. No single place that says which revision is actually released.
Revisions get emailed around and printed with no enforced sign-off — and no record of who released what, or when.
Superseded and obsolete drawings keep circulating on the shop floor with nothing on the page to flag that they've been replaced.
§8.5.2 and §8.5.6 spell out exactly what document control and change control have to do. Traceline's workflow maps to both directly — not as a marketing claim, but as the actual mechanics of the app.
Every drawing carries a part number and revision letter. Status — draft, pending approval, released, superseded, obsolete — is always shown, never inferred from a filename.
A revision can't become "released" without passing Submit → Approve. Enforced at the database level: only one released revision can exist per document, ever.
Approving or rejecting a release requires re-entering your password and typing your full name as an attestation — recorded as its own immutable signature record, tied to the exact audit entry it authorizes.
One search finds the released drawing — full-text, across part numbers, descriptions, and the text inside the PDF itself. Never a stale copy by accident.
Every state change is written to an append-only audit log. Nothing can be edited or deleted after the fact — not even by an admin account. The database itself refuses the write.
Engineering Change Notices carry their own justification and impact assessment, and require review and approval before an engineer even starts the revision — not a rubber stamp after the fact. Every ECN links to the exact revision that implements it.
Superseded and obsolete drawings are watermarked the moment they're downloaded — "SUPERSEDED" or "OBSOLETE — DO NOT USE" — so a printed copy can't be mistaken for current.
Traceline is built to support the document- and change-control practices AS9100 §8.5.2 and §8.5.6 require. Certification applies to your organization's quality management system as a whole, following an accredited third-party audit — Traceline is the tool, not the certificate.
Attach the PDF and describe what changed. It lands as a draft only you and reviewers can see.
One click sends it to an Approver. Nothing reaches the shop floor without it.
The Approver reviews and releases it. The previous revision is automatically marked superseded.
Anyone downloading the old revision from then on gets it clearly watermarked.
Traceline renders both revisions and highlights exactly what moved, was added, or was removed — no need to eyeball two PDFs side by side.
Engineering Change Notices carry their own justification and impact assessment, get reviewed and approved before work starts, and link automatically to the revision that implements them.
Draw a box directly on the page while reviewing and leave a comment — reviewers see exactly which region a note refers to, not just a free-text rejection reason.
Releasing a revision means re-entering your password and typing your full name — a real signature, recorded as its own immutable audit entry, not just a button click.
Search by part number, description, or text pulled from the released drawing itself — works with any CAD-exported PDF with a real text layer.
Viewer, Engineer, Approver, Admin. Engineers upload; only Approvers can release.
Group drawings into projects and filter the dashboard by them — so the list stays navigable as it grows into the thousands.
Every revision's full approval history — who, when, what changed — as a PDF you can hand an external auditor without giving them a login.
Generate an expiring, revocable link to a released drawing for a supplier or customer — pinned to that exact revision, so what they see never silently changes out from under them.
Anything with real impact goes through an Engineering Change Notice first — justification, impact assessment, and a reviewer's sign-off, before a single line gets redrawn. And when a revision is actually ready to release, approving it means re-entering your password and typing your full name, not just clicking a button.
This is a real revision history from a running instance of Traceline — six revisions of one bracket drawing, each with the actual change description an engineer typed in and a full, unbroken audit trail underneath it.
Even an Admin account can't alter or delete a history entry. The database rejects the write — it's not just an app-level rule.
Draft revisions are visible only to their uploader and engineering. Released drawings are visible to your whole team — never the reverse.
Traceline is a fully managed service — hosting, backups, upgrades, and security patching are ours to handle. No server for your team to operate or keep patched.
Export a full document register or an aging report of revisions stuck in review, on demand — not assembled by hand the week before a surveillance audit.
Bring a handful of real PDFs. We'll walk through the whole loop — upload, approve, release, obsolete — in about fifteen minutes.