The client recognized the need to enhance their technical manuals, but faced limitations while authoring and illustrating them effectively. Additionally, their previous vendor's manual-heavy processes and restricted access to source files led to decreased productivity and delayed updates, resulting in increased costs.

Considering the rapidly evolving technology in the industry, coupled with stringent regulatory demands across a diverse array of aircraft manufacturers and aircraft models, the client needed an experienced and reliable partner who could help them streamline their technical documentation pipeline with agile practices and open access, while maintaining high-quality standards for compliance.

The client approached HCLTech to help them address their challenges by implementing a strategic and scalable transformation approach. This approach aimed to automate end-to-end development, maintenance and publishing of system and component manuals, ensuring zero disruption during the transition from the previous vendor. The solution was also expected to maintain its agility to adapt and ensure there were no accessibility issues.

In addition to this, their demand involved the development and revision of production and retrofit program manuals. This included moving away from static PDF formats to editable SGML/XML formats, which allowed for quick and easy updates. As a result, airlines were provided with airline- and aircraft-specific digital data files that were aligned with the standards and requirements set by the industry-leading fleet manufacturers.

Our team at HCLTech meticulously planned a tailor-made approach that aligned with the client’s unique requirements. One of the key steps of our solution approach involved migrating any ongoing and previous vendor workflows through a scalable pipeline, facilitating the creation, maintenance and publication of all technical documentation and component manuals. We swiftly converted the older PDF files into an open, editable XML format to streamline more accessible updates and revisions, followed by implementing documentation standards relevant to the aviation industry, specifically S1000D and ATAiSpec2200. To achieve this, we leveraged a combination of advanced tools – HCLTech Adonis and PTC’s Arbortext – the industry standard platform for XML based content management.

Utilizing these tools enabled us to automate an otherwise highly manual process and quickly take ownership of all PDF files from the previous vendor. We rapidly scanned, identified and extracted the content and schema from the PDF files to render them for an XML workflow in order to align with various manual standards. Our approach ensured accurate authoring and illustration of the relevant inputs into compliant SGML and XML formats, as well as the revision and recreation of manuals as digital data for final delivery. We ensured strict compliance with major aircraft manufacturers in order to seamlessly implement our solution across their OEM programs, as their aircraft models were used by multiple global airline fleets.