Ryan Chin is an accomplished supply chain professional with more than 20 years of leadership experience. He’s known for spearheading critical supplier initiatives, including technical qualification endeavors, delivery optimization strategies, and quality compliance initiatives within program development and certification settings. Ryan is also adept at cultivating strong partnerships with internal stakeholders and external entities to advance organizational objectives and enhance overall performance.

Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Content Speaking: Structured Content as the Best Investment in Certification, Scale, and Safety

Co-presented with: Bernard Aschwanden

Choosing a component content management system for an aerospace startup requires more than comparing vendor features. The decision must account for evolving aircraft designs, certification, configuration control, limited resources, aggressive schedules, and documentation that will eventually support production, operations, maintenance, training, and continued airworthiness.

Drawing on a real aerospace startup, we’ll explain how to define requirements, determine where DITA and structured content add value, evaluate essential capabilities, and avoid choices that create costly limitations later. You’ll leave with a practical, brand-agnostic framework for selecting a CCMS that can scale from prototype and certification through production and long-term operations.

In this session, you’ll learn how to:

• Define CCMS requirements around business, engineering, certification, operational, and publishing needs rather than vendor feature lists.
• Determine where DITA, reusable topics, maps, metadata, conditional processing, and structured content provide measurable value to an aerospace program.
• Evaluate support for traceability, configuration control, aircraft effectivity, review and approval, regulatory evidence, and controlled publishing.
• Distinguish essential startup capabilities from features that can be deferred until the aircraft program and documentation organization mature.
• Identify attractive demonstration features that may become operational, integration, performance, or governance problems several years after implementation.
• Avoid common mistakes involving premature customization, weak information architecture, unmanaged metadata, uncontrolled reuse, and dependence on proprietary processes.
• Evaluate migration, integration, implementation, validation, training, administration, and long-term operating costs—not simply software licensing.
• Build a brand-agnostic selection and proof-of-concept process that tests realistic aerospace content, users, workflows, and outputs.
• Select an approach that can grow from a small certification team into a governed enterprise content operation supporting production and continued airworthiness.