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Project Summary:

This scoping study is to investigate the potential application of tools and techniques for electronic technical support publications from the aerospace and defence sectors to the production machinery sector.

Project Partners:
Cranfield University
GKN Aerospace Engineering Services
AMTRI
MTA
Electroimpact UK
Domino UK

Need:

The DTI has identified the potential use of the Internet to allow machinery manufacturers to offer a better service to their customers. There is a continuing requirement for productivity increases in UK manufacturing, and one way that this can be achieved is through downtime reductions.

Solution:

The use of electronic maintenance information has been shown to deliver significant downtime savings in the aerospace and defence sectors over the past 20 years. The solution is a combination of advanced authoring technologies including features such as content management, configuration control and automatic translation; the adoption of a standards-based approach, and the use of electronic delivery mechanisms such as the Internet and/or cheap mass storage such as CD-ROM and DVD.

Benefits:

The benefits of electronic support documents to machinery suppliers include cheaper provision of ‘mass customised’ documents, lower translation costs, greater control of document revision level and cheaper integration of supplier information. The benefits to users include reduced cost of storage, faster and easier access to current technical information, more usable documents and reduced training cost; all leading to reduced downtime and greater productivity.