Corporate InDesign Workflow for catalog publishing

My group handles the creation of several catalogs ranging in size from 16 pages to 2,000+. The catalogs are made up of individual product profiles that we assemble in InDesign books. The same profile can be in multiple catalogs. Anyhow, are trying to figure out an ideal workflow for receiving the content that goes into these individual product pages. We currently receive the content in various ways. It could be a marked-up pdf of a similar product with comments like, "change the title to this, I'll email new body copy and send an Excel doc with the specs that go into a table." It could be a screen grab of the profile with handwriting on it showing a simple text revision.

It's not a very efficient system and it puts the entire responsibility of keeping these correct on the designers. An engineer could call and say we need to change a spec due to an error in the previous version. A designer can make that change and there is no written proof the engineer said to change it. We want a controlled workflow where the engineer submits a controlled document that can be tracked/edited/approved/signed off on, etc.. I know there has to be a better workflow than what we are using now. I've thought about InCopy, but didn't know if there was something else? I know this may not make sense, but I work for large company and I think we are creating large catalogs in the same fashion as when we were very small. There has to be a better way to handle them.