Document Management - Cradle document management tool

Cradle Documents Management

Most projects use documents, as sources of information and as outputs to customers or other groups. The legal or commercial significance of documents forces most projects to have a document-centric process. So, irrespective of the extent to which the data-centric approaches of requirements management and systems engineering are being used, the project is typically managed by the issue states of its key input and output documents.

This forces each project to accept documents, work with the component items inside them, and generate new documents to meet the project's commercial and legal constraints. Typically, this will be repeated many times, with new issues of each source document and new issues of each of its formal documents:

For this to occur, the project needs to:

Report which items have been created or updated from a specific instance of an input document
List the differences between the items updated from two input documents or from two instances of a single input document
List which documents have created or updated specific items
Report which items have been published in a given instance of an output document
List the differences between the items that have been published in two output documents or two instances of a single document
List all documents in which specific items have been published

The Benefits

With Cradle you can produce project documentation quickly and easily (optionally automatically), and ensure:

Completeness: Cradle guarantees that every document is complete, avoiding time consuming and costly manual verification of your documents
Consistency: each piece of information will appear in exactly the same form everywhere that it appears, avoiding more time consuming and costly manual verification
Relevance: since you can publish new documentation quickly and easily and with a complete guarantee of quality, you ensure that every document is relevant when released
Authority: the guaranteed relevance of all documents ensures that they always have the authority intended by their authors

Cradle provides full document management whilst allowing you to work in a data-centric way, in agile processes, in more classical requirements management, and in model-based systems engineering (MBSE).

The Cradle Solution

Cradle meets all of these needs with source documents and formal documents:

Source documents: are loaded into the database by the Document Loader tool to create items such as user requirements, acronyms, standards, references or acceptance criteria:
Formal documents: are published from the database by the Document Publisher tool using user-defined templates to fulfil a specific need of an external group, typically a customer

Cradle Document Management Features Include ...

Support multiple versions of any number of source and formal document, all stored in Cradle
Compare versions of documents
Coverage analysis between a document and the database
Track every word in every source document into the database, through every change in the database, to every word in every formal document from the database
Managed with a built-in configuration management system with formal change control

This allows you to:

Work in a data-centric manner:
- Where all data is stored once, but used many times
- Where the database is a single point of truth
Interface fully and seamlessly with its document-centric environment
Track all changes to every input document through the database
Track every piece of every output document
Publish any number of documents that are guaranteed to be complete and consistent