Applying a Docs-as-Code approach to QMS
Creating documentation correctly in the first instance removes the need for secondary Quality Management Systems (QMS) or Document Management System (DMS) software. Integrating Gitlab as a DevOps tool for documentation is a lightweight and scalable way to enhance a QMS.
A QMS needs to include a robust way to manage and distribute organizational content such as the quality manual, quality policies objectives, work procedures, instructions, data management records, internal processes etc. Traditional tools revolving around standalone MS word documents uploaded as a PDF to a DMS or tool such as SharePoint use decades old workflows prove expensive, not intuitive, and bottleneck businesses.
Using an online knowledge base to distribute your quality documentation makes content more accessible and functional. As briefly mentioned in Creating technical documentation, we can use Jekyll to generate content for us and distribute it to websites (internally or externally). This gives us a nice and polished front-end look. More importantly, it also gives us a hugely powerful backend that essentially replaces traditional QMS / DMS software. It replaces a QMS by leveraging GitLab's integrated DevOps features, and replaces a DMS as the content due to inherently source controlled content and automatic distribution.
Example
A QMS Demo environment.