Material records are revised. A laboratory may reissue a report, a scale ticket may be corrected, or a lot identifier may be resolved later. The correction should improve the current account without making the earlier one vanish.
Decide whether it is a draft or a confirmed fact
A draft can be edited before review. Once a record has been confirmed or shared, changing it in place can make earlier decisions impossible to reconstruct. Create a new version that identifies the record it supersedes and explains why.
Keep provenance visible
Retain the original source, corrected source, author, timestamp and reviewer outcome. The latest version can be the default view while the superseded version remains accessible. If an accepted package was already sent to another company, publish a corrected package rather than silently altering the recipient's copy.
- What changed
- Why it changed
- Who approved it
- Which downstream records or packages need review
Re-evaluate downstream impact
A correction may change a specification decision or an affected-lot set. Trace those dependencies and mark conclusions that need another look; do not assume that correcting the data automatically corrects every decision based on it.
What this looks like in practice
A laboratory reissues assay V2 after discovering a unit transcription error in V1. V2 supersedes V1 and the affected customer package gets a new approved version. The customer's previously accepted V1 remains in its audit trail.
Versioning supports an audit trail; it does not prove that the corrected value is scientifically valid without appropriate review.