Expertise & Projects

IETM / IETP technology puts information where it’s needed faster and with ease of accessibility. Electronic manuals are the most efficient and cost-effective method to control, deliver and maintain data.

The Interactive Electronic Technical Manual (IETM) was first conceptualized in the1980’s as a means of compressing volumes of paper documents into easily portable and storable digital media or on line pages. These properties along with increased functionality of IETM software, inclusion of various media within the text and quick and easy access to the desired information has made the IETM the preferred choice.

The format and style of the presented information is optimized for presentation in electronic form, either on a desktop PC, laptop, or any other portable electronic display. The presentation format is “frame-oriented” not “page-oriented” as in paper documents. Multiple paths are provided for easy access to the required information.
We have over 2 decades of experience and can tailor an IETM to any standard to meet your requirements. An indicative list of major IETM Projects delivered to premier Defence PSUs / Suppliers is attached. Additional information on IETM is given as an attachment

Advantages of IETM’s

IETM’s are significantly superior to the traditional paper-based technical manuals in real world conditions.

Weight

Standard calculations assume that a CD can store approximately 3,400 pages of text, tables and graphics. This is about 9 kg of paper-based information. Since a CD with cover weighs less than 0.05kgs, an Aircraft Carrier could reduce 33 Tons of paper weight to less than 226 Kg if all information were to be placed on CDs.

Volume

Approximately 1,850 cubic feet of storage space is needed to store 37tons of paper aboard an Aircraft Carrier. The same documentation would only occupy 35 cubic feet if placed entirely on CD.

Information Access

At a minimum, even the most basic (Class I) IETM’s provide a limited hyper linking capability to allow the user to point, click, and quickly access desired information. Functionalities of higher classes’ permit word/phrase search capability.

Up-to-date Information

Once an IETM has been developed, a process for integrating and distributing updates should be implemented. The electronic “sticky notes” feature of IETM’s can be used as an interim solution between updates.

IETM’s and Other Management Information Systems

IETMs can be integrated with other management information system to provide the maintainer access to all available technical documentation stored in different locations.

Improvements in Life-cycle Support

Life-cycle costs of maintaining IETM’s will be a fraction of the cost required to maintain conventional paper manuals.

Reduction in Costs of Printing and Publishing

Printing costs and costs related to maintaining paper documents can eliminated.

Reduction in requirement of storage space

Storage space required for technical literature can be substantially reduced with the elimination of paper technical manuals.

Reduction in Shipping Costs

Freight handling and shipping costs can be eliminated.

Features of IETM’s that Improve Maintenance

Information access and presentation.

With IETM’s, all required information can be accessed by a click. The interactive visual presentation of complex procedures by using animations, video clips, virtual reality and expert system modules provide the maintainer with total comprehension of the task on hand.

Reduction in Time for Technical Information Update/Modification

Correcting and updating information on electronic media can be easily done through key text-searching capabilities. Changes made are applied globally eliminating the need for a separate change package for each stand-alone paper TM.

Maintenance Improvements

Areas where maintenance process improvements can be realized using IETM’s are:

  • Shorter MTTR
  • Greater productivity of technicians
  • Reduction in time for updating and correcting discrepancies in maintenance
  • manuals
  • Reduction in time spent on maintenance paperwork

Class / level of IETM

  • Traditionally printed technical manuals that are only delivered as paper manuals.

  • These electronic documents are page raster images that have been scanned, not live text. They may link from the Table of Contents to specific pages, and are very inexpensive to produce.

  • Level 2 manuals are page-oriented live ASCII text with SGML/XML tags. They may use hypertext links to other related areas within the document, and can include multimedia.

  • Level 3 technical manuals are made of linear-structured information that use HTML, SGML or XML, yet still resemble paper documents. Level 3 technical manuals are most often viewed as indexed PDF files.
  • The difference between IETM Class II and Class III is analogous to the difference between PDF book and a web site. The book structure is discarded; instead the document is structured more freely following the logic of the content. The document can still be printed but it won’t necessarily match the presentation on the screen. Hyper linking throughout the document is expected. The document would be authored in a markup language, typically SGML.

  • Level 4 IETMS are hierarchically structured manuals and are specifically authored for interactive electronic presentation. They allow for robust cross-referencing between data. Level 4 IETM data is commonly tagged using SGML or XML and stored in a relational or object-oriented database.
  • Obtaining benefits of data integrity and removal of data redundancy. Relationships in the content that are presented as hyperlinks are mapped directly to relations in the database schema. Redundancy in the data that exists in earlier classes should be removed. The sequence of presentation is also different that earlier classes This class now expects the data to be stored in a relational database,. There is no longer the concept of a static page. Content can change dynamically based on user’s navigation and input through the content; the content may now be user specific. It is no longer possible to print a linear format of the document.

  • The Integrated Process IETM lets a user interact with the technical manual, and in turn, the manual interacts with different processes. The processes may include expert systems, computer based training modules, interactive schematics, test equipment, prime equipment diagnostics, intrusive or remote diagnostics, etc., often exhaustive manuals are created and implemented.
  • In this class the documentation is now integrated with expert systems that may influence the display of content. For example, the IETM system may aggregate data from a large number of users input; feed that to the expert system that analyzes it and then the result gets fed back to the user through the IETM system. An analogy might be Google search, where search results are improved based on analysis of large data sets of previous queries entered by users.

Tools and Standards

Publishing / Authoring Tools (IETM):

  • Generator’s
  • Adobe FrameMaker
  • PTC Arbortext
  • Adobe PDF Writer
  • XML Editor
  • Visual Studio – (.NET, C#)