Self-Auditing Compliance Documentation for Regulated Products Using DITA

Many industries from aviation to pharmaceuticals require documentation compliance to government regulations and industry standards. Adding complication is that products often need to be certified in different countries which may require different standards and slightly different content. With documents that are constantly changing and evolving it is crucial that certain information not be removed or adjusted too much without knowing how that is affecting compliance. Despite being time consuming and fraught with errors, many companies track that compliance in spreadsheets.

At Streamline Designs, we are using process automation, metadata, and indexing to track compliance in the documents themselves and managing multiple certifications of the same product with very little overhead. We believe this method can be adapted to multiple industries and will share how to set up a basic version using DITA.