Solving Common Challenges with Inaccurate Document Management

When safety, precision, and compliance are of utmost importance, streamlining your document management process is essential for the safe operations of your organisation.

However, document management in regulated industries comes with its own set of challenges:

• Data Inconsistencies: Discrepancies between documents can result in miscommunication and errors in aircraft maintenance or operation.
• Manual Document Revision: Reviewing and comparing large documents manually is not only time-consuming but also prone to human error.
• Frequent Regulatory Updates: Aviation companies must regularly update their documents to reflect new regulations, which can be complex and time-consuming.
• Content Syndication between Systems: Many aviation companies rely on legacy systems for document management. Integrating these systems with modern tools can be difficult, leading to inefficiencies and errors in document handling.
• Clear Audit Trail: Showing clear audit trail of where changes have been made and why, is essential for both regulatory authorities and internal users. Without accurate change reports, users would need to read the entire document to find out what section or content has changed.

How you address these challenges depends on your unique business environment and use case. To help you find the right solution for your organisation, we have outlined a few of the most effective ways to overcome the hurdles of inaccurate document management.

Minimise Inconsistencies and Human Error

Many document management processes still rely on manual entry, which increases the risk of errors. These errors can have significant consequences, from operational disruptions to regulatory non-compliance. Ensuring that all personnel involved in document management are adequately trained and follow consistent procedures is essential but often difficult to achieve.

• Robust Review Process: To minimise human error during manual revisions, you need to implement a more thorough manual review process where multiple experts cross-verify document changes. You can also use checklists and guidelines to ensure comprehensive reviews. This method ensures human oversight, contextual understanding and better awareness of document content among team members.
• Accurate Version Control: Automate the data entry processes where possible and introduce integrated document comparison to detect any changes between document versions. A dedicated comparison software, such as XML Compare, is much more powerful in detecting change than the human eye and faster in doing so. After changes are found, they can be reviewed by document managers in case of conflict.
• Automated Validation Checks: You can also implement validation checks within your Document Management System (DMS) to flag inconsistencies or missing information before a document is finalised or published.

By utilising automation tools and implementing a more streamlined review process, you can minimise the human input as much as possible, thus reduce the chance of error. At the same time, the process still involves human oversight for contextual accuracy, but only when human intervention is required.

Stay up-to-date with regulatory standards

Updating technical documents in regulated industries requires attention to detail and strict adherence to compliance standards. Non-compliance can lead to serious consequences, including legal action, fines, or loss of certification.

• Implement a document control system to track changes, ensuring that only the latest approved versions are in circulation. Maintain a detailed audit trail for all document changes, including who made changes, when, and why.
• Follow a standardised update process for document revisions to ensure that all document updates go through a rigorous review and approval process involving relevant stakeholders, including compliance officers if necessary.
• Maintain proper documentation of changes with every change made to a technical document, including the rationale behind the change. Include references to any external documents, standards, or guidelines that justify the changes. Use document comparison software to detect changes between document versions and produce clear, user-friendly redline reports.
• Train staff regularly to ensure that all employees involved in document updates are aware of regulatory requirements and internal procedures.
• Implement risk management to mitigate identified risks, such as additional reviews or obtaining external expert opinions.

Produce user-friendly change reports

When updating technical documents, ensuring content is 100% accurate and produced in time is only half of the document revision process. Once the revised document is published, it needs to be syndicated to all relevant parties, both internally and externally. This ensures team awareness with the new changes and notifies authorities of the change, in accordance with regulatory standards.

Mastering the creation of accurate, user-friendly change reports can significantly speed up document review times and improve the overall user experience. For example, by integrating the right technology in their document revision process, one of our long-term customers – SunExpress – reduced the time needed for users to find changes by as much as 80%.

Let’s explore a few different methods to producing a comprehensive revision summary:

• Manual Review and Cross-Checking: Human reviewers can provide context and interpretation that automated tools cannot, enhancing the value of redline reports. However, this method is very time consuming and prone to human error.
• Tracked Changes: This method can highlight changes in content, formatting, and even embedded objects, providing a thorough revision report. However, using tracked changes can quickly become very messy! It can generate overly detailed redline reports, including minor changes that may not be relevant, making reports harder to interpret.
• Digital Signature and Change Approval Workflows, such as DocuSign, Adobe Sign, or custom workflow automation tools, ensure that all changes are documented and approved, with the ability to generate reports showing what was changed and by whom. However, this method is focuses more on the approval process rather than detailed content changes, so redline capabilities may be secondary.
• Version Control Systems (VMS), such as Git, Subversion (SVN), or Mercurial, provide accurate line-by-line tracking, showing exactly what lines of text have changed, added, or removed between document versions. However, they often struggle with generating redline reports for non-text files, such as tables or images.
• Content Management Systems (CMS): Many CMS/CCMS/DMS can generate audit trails that include changes made to documents, often including metadata changes. Some systems may even have built-in tools to generate redline reports directly within the platform. However, the process might require custom configurations or integrations and may not be as effective as a specialised comparison software.
• Specialised Comparison Software: The clue is in the name – using document comparison software that is specially designed for content comparison can produce the most accurate results, even when comparing non-text content, such as tables and images. If you’re working with XML-based documentation, both XML Compare and XML Merge are solutions that can be utilised to create comprehensive revision summary with clear audit trail. Depending on your specific requirements, specialised comparison software can be configured to ignore changes that aren’t required in the summary, detect moving content and find changes in specification tables and expanding diagrams.

Streamline Content Syndication between Systems

Streamlining content syndication between systems, particularly for document management, is essential for ensuring the accurate and efficient distribution of critical information between aviation manufacturers, airlines and regulatory bodies. Here are a few things you can do to ensure your content is efficiently distributed across the network:

• Establish a Single Source of Truth: This is where Document Management Systems (DMS) shine. A DMS can serve as the primary repository for all aviation-related content. This ensures that all syndicated content originates from a consistent and controlled source.
• Metadata Management: Standardise metadata tags across all documents. This facilitates easier searching, categorisation, and retrieval of documents across systems.
• Use Standardised Data Formats: Adopt industry-standard formats for document exchange. In aviation, some of the most commonly used standards are XML, S1000D and ATA iSpec 2200. These formats are widely supported and ensure compatibility between different systems.
• API Integration: Utilise APIs to enable seamless data exchange between the DMS and other platforms and solutions, such as maintenance systems, crew management systems, and regulatory bodies. APIs allow for automated, real-time content updates across systems. They are also particularly useful in enhancing your DMS functionality by integrating specialised comparison software, that can greatly improve content accuracy and auditing.

Conclusion

By focusing on these strategies, aviation organisations can significantly reduce human error, maintain compliance and streamline content syndication between systems, ensuring that critical information is consistently distributed, up-to-date, and accessible across the organisation.