Procedures portal
An internal portal that turns procedure PDFs into something you can ask questions of. The administrator uploads the document, and the organisation stops depending on a colleague's memory.
What it solves
- Answers cite the procedure and section they came from, because on procedures an answer without a source is useless.
- Upload a new revision and every query is answered from the current version. Nobody is left working off an old PDF.
- Per-user access control: each person queries only the procedures that apply to them.
- The query log is a diagnostic: it reveals what needs reinforcing in training and, on top of that, which procedures are badly written.
- Eliminates the corridor question, the most expensive and least visible way to transfer knowledge.
Every company past a certain size has its procedures documented. And in almost all of them, the document lives in a shared folder nobody opens. The real interface to procedures isn’t the PDF: it’s asking a colleague.
That mechanism works, and it’s enormously expensive. It interrupts whoever knows, answers with whatever that person remembers, and leaves no trace. This portal replaces that interface.
How it works
The procedures administrator uploads the document as a PDF. The site processes it through RAG: chunking it, indexing it and turning it into queryable material. From there any authorised user asks in plain language (“what do I do if a supplier delivers an incomplete order?”) and gets the answer that’s in the procedure.
There’s no parallel content to maintain: the source of truth is still the official PDF the administrator was already managing.
Answering isn’t enough: it has to cite
In a general chatbot, an approximate answer is acceptable. On procedures it isn’t: if someone is going to act on what they read, they have to be able to verify it.
So answers cite the procedure and the section they came from. That changes what the tool is: it stops being an assistant that offers opinions and becomes a finder that takes you to the text. And it gives the person asking something they can bring to a meeting or an audit.
Always the current version
The classic problem with procedures isn’t that they don’t exist: it’s that three versions exist and people work off whichever one they downloaded. When the administrator uploads a revision, every query starts being answered from it immediately. There are no local copies ageing in anyone’s downloads folder.
Who can see what
Not every procedure is for everyone. The portal defines access per user, so each person queries only what applies to them. A finance or HR procedure doesn’t surface in the answers of someone who shouldn’t see it.
The query log is a diagnostic
This is the part I find most interesting, because it’s information that didn’t exist before.
Knowing which procedures get consulted most is useful for reinforcing training: if a process concentrates questions, that’s where instruction is needed. But the same data supports a second reading, less comfortable and more useful: if a procedure is queried constantly, maybe the problem is the procedure. A clear document generates few questions.
So the portal doesn’t just distribute documentation: it hands the administrator evidence of which documents need rewriting.
The hours nobody counts
The biggest saving is the one no spreadsheet records. Every corridor question costs twice: the time of the person asking and the interruption of the person answering. Resolved in the portal, that cost disappears, and the knowledge stops depending on whether the person who holds it happens to be available that day.
Confidential project. There’s no repository or public demo.