SIGQ App
A Rails 8 web app to browse, search and manage IPT's quality management system documents — replacing scattered SharePoint PDFs with full-text search, notifications and subscriptions.
Overview
The SIGQ App is a web application designed to make IPT’s quality management system (SIGQ) actually usable. IPT’s quality documentation — 14 processes, process management documents, working procedures, templates and forms — currently lives in SharePoint as a scattered collection of PDFs and Office documents, making it hard for staff to find the right procedure and even harder to notice when a document has been superseded by a newer version.
Context
The problem is twofold. First, discovery: when someone needs to fill a form or follow a procedure, they struggle to find the right document among deeply nested SharePoint folders. Second, currency: when a procedure or template is updated, affected staff rarely notice, since there is no notification mechanism.
Three MEI-IoT students — Beatriz Moreira, António Gonçalves and Jéssica Baptista — were challenged to solve exactly this during their Software Engineering course project. Their proposal resulted in a Rails 8 application that ingests the documents, extracts their textual content and makes the whole corpus searchable.
What was built
The initial version, built by the three students, focuses on document ingestion and retrieval:
- Documents are imported and their content extracted using
markitdown, replacing a manual PDF-parsing approach based on Ruby regexes, producing clean markdown-structured text. - Search is powered by PostgreSQL full-text search combined with trigram similarity (
pg_trgm), enabling tolerant keyword queries across the entire document corpus. - The interface lets staff browse by process category and document type, or search across everything at once.
Following the initial course project, the supervisor extended the app with:
- A UI revamp for better usability.
- A notification and subscription system so staff can opt in to receive alerts when a document they rely on is updated.
- Tag-based organisation to support cross-cutting classification.
Status
The app has attracted interest from IPT’s Quality Team and is currently awaiting production testing.