Standard Procedures
Operating steps, checklists and escalation paths, indexed by process name and by the situation they apply to.
RAG Knowledge Base
RAG Knowledge Base Development for Business Documents
We turn the documents a business already owns into a searchable base that answers questions with the source attached. Contracts, standard procedures, product documentation and internal policy are indexed together, and every answer points back to the passage it came from.
Cited Answers
Document Governance
Access Control
- Answers linked to the document and section they came from
- Permissions follow the document, not the interface
- Content updates are versioned rather than overwritten
Content
What Goes Into the Knowledge Base
The base is only useful if the material inside it is current, owned and permitted. These five categories cover most requirements.
Product and Service Documentation
Specifications, setup guides and pricing rules that staff and customers both ask about.
Contracts and Terms
Agreement templates, delivery terms and warranty conditions, answerable by clause rather than by whole document.
Internal Policy
Approval limits, expense rules, leave policy and compliance requirements, each with an owner and a review date.
Support History
Resolved questions and case notes, included where they add a worked example the policy documents do not cover.
Ownership Records
For every document: who owns it, when it was last reviewed and which teams may retrieve it.
Retrieval
How a Question Becomes an Answer
Four steps, in this order. Skipping the first two is what makes a knowledge base answer confidently and wrongly.
1. Parse
Documents split into passages with their headings and page references kept, so a retrieved answer can be traced back.
2. Index
Passages indexed for retrieval, with document metadata attached: owner, department, effective date, permission level.
3. Retrieve
A question returns the passages that match it, filtered first by the permission level of the person asking.
4. Answer with Source
The response quotes the passage and names the document and section. Where nothing relevant is found, it says so instead of guessing.
Control
Access and Accuracy
Permission by Document
Retrieval is filtered by the asker's role, so a knowledge base can hold both open and restricted material in one place.
Data Handling
What to record, where it is stored and how deletion requests are handled, decided before the base is populated.
Review Routine
A scheduled review of documents that have aged out, plus a log of questions the base could not answer.
System Integration
Connections to the back office, CRM or support desk, so the base answers inside the tool the team already uses.
Questions
Common Questions
How much document material is needed before starting?
Enough to cover the questions the base is expected to answer. Where a topic has only one outdated document, that topic is scoped as a content task first rather than an indexing task.
Can the answer be traced back to the source?
Yes. Each answer names the document and section it came from, and the passage is shown alongside the response so it can be checked.
What happens when a document is updated?
The new version replaces the indexed passages and the effective date changes. Older passages stop being retrieved, so answers do not mix two versions of the same policy.
Can different teams see different material?
Yes. Permission levels are attached to documents and applied during retrieval, so a shared base can serve several teams with different access.
Knowledge Base Scope
Send a sample of the documents and the questions the team keeps asking.
That combination shows what can be answered from existing material and where the documentation needs work first.
