How to Use an Audit Trail to Improve Label Management

An audit trail is the record of every action taken on a label or artwork file. It usually includes:

• Who made the change, comment, review, or approval.
• What action they took.
• When they took it, with a date and timestamp.
• Which version of the file they acted on.
• Whether the file was approved, rejected, or sent back for changes.
• What comments or markups were added during review.
• What changed over time across versions and workflow stages.

This level of visibility is what turns proofing history into a usable compliance record.

It also explains why teams are in dire need of systems with built-in version comparison, tracked comments, and approval logs instead of scattered feedback across tools like email, Slack, or WhatsApp.

Want to catch errors faster and stop them from repeating? It starts with traceability.

Here are three reasons an audit trail should be part of every product labeling workflow.

What happens when no one can tell you who approved the last version?

Without an audit trail, project managers spend time chasing updates. It becomes difficult to track ownership, feedback, or bottlenecks.

An audit trail solves this by linking every action to a user, version, and timestamp. It makes progress visible, highlights delays, and builds accountability across teams.

If you’re still treating compliance like a final check, you’re adding risk to your business.

Regulatory authorities such as the FDA and EU expect electronic records to be authentic, traceable, and secure.

In practice, this means an effective audit trail should show:

• Who acted
• What changed
• When it changed
• Which version was approved or rejected

Requirements are constantly evolving and vary by region, product type, and claims. An audit trail helps you respond quickly when regulators, auditors, or internal teams ask for proof.

Instead of digging through emails, you can access complete approval history directly from the system.

If you cannot trace where an error started, you end up reviewing and revising more than necessary.

An audit trail lets you pinpoint the exact stage where the issue occurred, whether it was a content update, missed comment, version mix-up, or incorrect approval.

This significantly reduces recurring mistakes, cuts unnecessary revision cycles, and helps improve time to market.

Managing audit trails across multiple products and projects becomes difficult without the right system.

Manual processes may work at a small scale, but they break down as volume increases. That is why traceability is now seen as a scaling requirement, not just a compliance need.

Here is how a purpose-built system helps:

Still routing approvals through generic project tools? That is where traceability starts to break.

While general tools can assign tasks, they rarely capture file-level review history or structured approval records.

That is why packaging teams often outgrow them and move to workflow systems built for artwork review.

Customizable workflows break the labeling process into defined stages, with clear ownership at each step. As tasks move forward, actions are automatically recorded, forming a natural audit trail.

These workflows can be sequential or parallel. In other words, you can route a single project step by step or move multiple review tasks at the same time. Both models help you maintain traceability across jobs without losing control.

Most importantly, they centralize comments, approvals, and status updates into a single source of truth.

WebCenter Go helps you run both sequential and parallel workflows, helping teams maintain traceability while reducing turnaround time on your projects. It also improves collaboration, helps teams understand timelines more clearly, and shortens artwork approval cycles.

Who actually gave the green light?

An e-signature answers that clearly. When this feature is enabled, any user who tries to approve an artwork is required to sign electronically before the file can move to the next stage.

As Jan De Roeck puts it:

“Approvals still often depend on a signature as the final OK to print, which is exactly why digital approval tools matter so much in modern packaging workflows.”

But the real value comes when the e-signature is tied to a specific version, user role, timestamp, and approval gate.

WebCenter Go allows you to configure e-signatures within workflows, making approvals structured, traceable, and easier to manage.

Are your old files searchable, or just stored somewhere?

An artwork library acts as a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system. It stores assets along with version history, change records, and metadata.

This ensures historical traceability and quick access to the right files.

WebCenter Go’s library lets you organize, search, archive, and reuse artwork efficiently, while maintaining a complete record of changes. You can even search for files by name, date, or metadata entered into project fields such as product, brand, category, and variant.

You’re here because you’re still guessing which the latest file version is after multiple review rounds.

With multiple iterations in circulation, it becomes difficult to identify the latest approved version, which is common.

If your team cannot trust the file history, errors multiply fast.

WebCenter Go includes built-in version control that auto-organizes files by the date and time they were created.

This helps your team find the correct version quickly. And if a file is accidentally overwritten, they can revert to a previous version in a single click without starting from scratch.

When critical label checks happen only after design and approvals are mostly complete, you end up finding problems late.

This leads to rework, delays, and more chances for the wrong version to move forward.

Modern label workflows are moving in a different direction. More teams are embedding automated checks directly into the approval process, so issues are caught before a file advances.

These checks may include for:

• Allergens
• Barcodes
• Font sizes
• Logos and symbols
• Nutrition tables
• Mandatory statements
• FDA formatting requirements
• Misleading or missing claims

When these checks are built into the workflow, the system does more than flag an issue. It also records the results.

This is exactly where AI-assisted compliance is gaining ground. Esko Comply is designed in a way that it is built into your artwork workflows, to run automated checks against your label to find discrepancies.

Need to prove your records are reliable?

According to FDA 21 CFR Part 11, brands must maintain audit trails that capture changes to critical data. This includes:

• The date, time, and sequence of labeling events.
• All version changes made to the document.
• The names of all members who worked on every task.

Basically, electronic data must be traceable to ensure authenticity, integrity, and confidentiality.

A strong audit trail allows you to produce this evidence instantly, without reconstructing it later.

WebCenter Go is designed to support these requirements by embedding traceability directly into the workflow.

Labeling errors are one of the most common causes of product launch delays. And every manual step in artwork development gives those errors another chance to creep in.

If you want to reduce recalls, avoid rework, and keep launches on track, you need a system that builds traceability into the process.

With WebCenter Go’s audit trails ensuring complete transparency, you can stay on top of compliance changes, track errors, and improve accountability within teams resulting in saved time, money, and improved speed-to-market.

If you’d like to improve your project traceability, contact us for a free demo today.