The Importance of Modernizing Technical Data
Have you ever purchased furniture that you had to put together yourself? (IKEA, we’re looking at you.) Once purchased, did you inventory all the parts provided to create that piece of furniture and ensure all were included? During assembly, did you use the provided directions? Did you miss any steps? Place the wrong parts together? All those parts, pieces, and instructions make up the information that is captured in the technical data required to build that piece of furniture. How important were the instructions and technical data to successfully assembling the furniture? Let’s now scale that process out to a far larger and complex extent: the assembly and support of a 380,000-pound military cargo aircraft. A jet engine alone for a large aircraft is roughly made up of 40,000 parts, and the time-consuming maintenance overhaul process for said engine could take up to 180 days and costs millions of dollars.
Now that we’ve painted a picture for you, it’s safe to say when it comes to the manufacturing of large and complex vehicles and equipment, the importance of accurate and accessible technical data cannot be stressed enough. This is the Department of Defense maintenance community’s backbone and a core reason they provide mission-ready equipment anytime, anywhere. But, like anything else, continual growth and modernization is critical to organizational success. Simply put, evolve, or become obsolete. According to IBM, modernization facilitates the introduction of new business capabilities and provides the agility to make an organization more adaptable to future market and technology disruptions. This flexibility also prepares the organization for unknown challenges in technology, customers, human error, and competition.
Legacy processes for management of technical data traditionally reside in large format, printed paper books with extensive tables of contents and large fold-out wiring diagrams with separate Illustrated Parts Breakdown (IPB) lists. The books not only are cumbersome to use, they also must be frequently updated. To increase accuracy and availability and to streamline legacy processes, ONEIL makes product information easier to use, faster to scale, and more efficient. Paper books are being supplemented or replaced entirely by searchable digital content managed by data elements to empower support crew with ease, flexibility, and speed to access current, safe technical data and engineering content/illustrations.
While the technical documentation industry is rapidly evolving, ONEIL, with 75 years of experience in product support for the Department of Defense and its industrial base, has been at the forefront of that evolution. Our employee-owner workforce with unmatched hands-on industry and military experience specializes in content development, open architecture solutions, Interactive Electronic Technical Manuals (IETMs), eLearning, and content management systems.
Whether your biggest pain point is managing technical content, navigating complex diagrams, troubleshooting equipment failure, replacing parts, training your field techs, or all the above, ONEIL arms your team with a suite of software tools that gives you complete control where and when you need it. We’ve helped transform legacy data to reduce costs and downtime and extend the lifetime of valuable equipment for thousands of companies and the U.S. Department of Defense. No one knows product support information like ONEIL. And no one makes product documentation more effortless for the end user to use. Start your evolution today!
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