Arbortext

Arbortext Automates the Creation of Content

As aircraft manufacturers incorporated computers into every aspect of their companies in the past two decades, some important but tedious tasks finally saw improvement with the application of automation.

An excellent example is the development of maintenance documents when a new aircraft, engine, or component is designed and manufactured. Design is all done on computers, which means that data--drawings and design information--are in electronic format.

When it comes time to write the maintenance and parts and other manuals, wouldn't it make sense to use as much of that electronic data as possible, without having to rewrite everything?

A company called Arbortext www.arbortext.com saw the opportunity for doing just that, creating content for manufacturers to speed the process of documentation development and enhance safety by allowing fewer errors and quicker updating of content.

"There is growing appreciation within many industries," said P.G. Bartlett, Arbortext's vice president of product marketing, "of the amount of waste in their processes for capturing and sharing information."

In 1991, Arbortext won a contract to develop a system to help the U.S. military create documents for weapons systems for aircraft, tanks, radar, and other systems. This work showed manufacturers that it was possible to create easily shared information using computers. And manufacturers then began requiring vendors to provide information on their products in an exchangeable digital format, which began as sgml (standard generalized markup language) and is now transitioning to xml (extensible markup language).

"There is growing appreciation within many industries of the amount of waste in their processes for capturing and sharing information," said Bartlett. "A bigger driver is to be able to do more things with that information."

The aviation industry has jumped onto this documentation bandwagon. "The aviation industry has been one of the few early adopters," he said. Arbortext customers include Airbus, Boeing, Bombardier, Cessna, Embraer, General Electric, Gulfstream, Hamilton Sundstrand, Pratt & Whitney, Pratt & Whitney Canada, and Rolls-Royce.

Airlines are also seeing opportunities for cost reduction by employing Arbortext's technology, including Delta Air Lines, Lufthansa, United Airlines, and US Airways. US Airways uses service documentation provided by Airbus and Boeing to create task cards. Instead of having to cut and paste information from the OEMs' maintenance documents into a US Airways task card, the airline simply references the OEM information on the task card. When the OEMs' information is updated, the link on the task card automatically directs the technician to the new information. This saves a lot of time and ensures that important safety information is passed on quickly.

Hamilton Sundstrand uses Arbortext to help it meet the demand by the manufacturers that it works with to provide easily exchangeable information. The transition began in 1998, when one of the OEMs for which Hamilton Sundstrand builds components specified in a product-support agreement that component maintenance manuals be provided in sgml format.

An early attempt to write manuals in sgml using a simple word processor, Microsoft's Notepad, resulted in huge expenditures of time, according to Don Kelley, a Hamilton Sundstrand technical writer. The time that used to be needed to create eight pages of text now produced only one page, an eight-to-one ratio. Clearly, there had to be a better way of creating exchangeable documents, in this case, by contract it had to be in sgml format.

After researching the available products, Hamilton Sundstrand selected Arbortext to help technical writers like Kelley create component maintenance manuals.

An immediate result was halving the content-creation ratio, and that ratio continues to drop as the technical writers gain skill using Arbortext's Epic authoring environment.

The Epic environment helps writers place sgml information correctly within the document, Kelley explained. The Arbortext software uses document-type definition to provide the validated structure of a document, sort of like a template to ensure that documents are created in the correct format. "After the author is done composing," he said, "he can check through Epic and it will make sure that it is a valid document. And it will also indicate to the writer any errors. It's really a handy tool."

Kelley admitted that having to create exchangeable documents is more work for writers. "But" he added, "we gain efficiency through revision cycles because of re-use capabilities." Certain text items that are used frequently but also need to be revised, such as a warning notice, can easily be updated throughout a document. "If I have to change that," he said, "then that content is changed throughout the library. It's immediate, and technicians get that data as soon as it's released."

The bottom line, concluded Arbortext's Bartlett, is that the software helps manufacturers "deliver better information in a more efficient way." -- By Matt Thurber