Shared document-problem at work

Hi

I've got a small problem at work and was wondering if I could get some help with ideas or advices on how to solve the problem. Let me first start by telling about the routine.

We have 12 departments with 3-4 managers in each department. Once in a while each department gets a journal-file (Word-file, but it's printed out on paper) for feedbacks and comments. The journal-file goes from one manager to another manager until its gone through all before the journal-file is being returned to us. All departments does this (so we get 12 files back). Each manager have 3 days to come with comments, but they never seem to manage to keep this deadline. We've tried to solve this problem by using one of our employees to call the managers and remind them - not a very effective way to use a work resources on.

What would be an effective way to solve this?

What I want is a way to automatically remind the managers that they must comment and pass it on to the next manager (journal is passed to the next manager and the PC should shut down or something if they don't do it). They should receive an e-mail reminder when there's 1 day left.

I know our company have Sharepoint, but I'm not sure this is achievable in SharePoint.
I could also create 12 folders with the names of the departments in the shared workspace in Explorer and the managers could just open the document and write their comments directly in it. But this doesnt help since they seem to always forget.

What's best to do in my situation?

Jam it back in, in the dark.