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Cessna Takes XML To The Skies

In a bid to streamline how information gets distributed to users, Cessna Aircraft Co. has opted to use an XML-based content management solution. DCLnews reports.

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AIRCRAFT are complex machines. If you don't maintain them properly, they'll fall down from the sky. So you'd expect maintenance manuals to be extensive. What surprises most people, however, is just how extensive they are. Some of the manuals that support Cessna aircraft, for example, stretch 10,000 pages long - and some aircraft models use as many as ten of them.

For Wichita-based Cessna, updating even one of these manuals is a slow, costly challenge. What's more, the manuals are published in different formats depending on user requirements and Federal regulations. The FAA, for instance, requires flight manuals be published on paper, while field service personnel generally prefer manuals on CD-ROM or delivered over the Internet.

In a bid to improve production of technical documentation, Cessna has signed an agreement with software firm Arbortext to help produce maintenance manuals, parts catalogs, and flight manuals.

Customized manuals

Russ Lowen, project leader for technical publications at Cessna, said the company will streamline the way information is distributed. Using Arbortext's software, they plan to offer customized manuals and catalogs so that pilots, field service personnel, and mechanics can quickly and easily locate information without sifting through "irrelevant content."

"Arbortext has been working with us for many years," said Lowen. "We have found the Arbortext software, with its outstanding XML support, to be ideally suited to help us create, re-use, and automatically publish our information. The solution we are implementing will enable us to more easily and efficiently create and publish content that is accurate, accessible, and complete."

Publishing on auto-pilot

Michigan-based Arbortext is a global provider of automated publishing software that lets organizations create personalized and searchable content for web, mobile, and print mediums. The firm's software is installed at over 1,300 organizations worldwide, including Boeing, British Aerospace, General Electric, Sun Microsystems, and Toyota.

Creating and delivering customized documentation, while keeping costs down, poses a huge challenge for publishing software designed for an earlier era - say seven to ten years back.

This is where Arbortext fits in. It provides the open standards-based tools to facilitate multi-channel publishing.

Ray Schiavone, president and CEO of Arbortext, explains: "Arbotext's ability to leverage the XML standard to automate customized publishing makes our software a perfect fit for user documentation and training manual applications. We look forward to working with organizations such as Cessna as they transform existing publishing procedures."

Business case for XML

Fact File

Cessna Aircraft Company is a subsidiary of Textron Inc. - an $11 billion multi-industry company with 49,000 employees in 40 countries. Textron is known around the world for brands including Bell Helicopter, Cessna Aircraft, Kautex, Lycoming, and E-Z-GO.

Looking at the wider field, aviation has been among the first to incorporate XML and SGML; not because of government regulation, but because of the business case for using these markup languages.

Mark Gross, president of DCL, takes up this point: "XML offers better control of publications and the ability to re-purpose data - both powerful drivers." he explains. "And the ability to produce all your publications - print, CD, Web - from a single source means you don't have to proofread documents multiple times with the attendant risks that implies. Plus all the versions of a document are available simultaneously to everyone. So not only does XML-based content management promise reductions in cost, it also promises greater quality control."

Holy grail

As to the future of XML publishing, Gross says content re-use (re-using similar chunks of information in different technical manuals) is the way to go.

"It's currently not widely used. But it's the holy grail, since it may significantly reduce the amount of materials that need to be written," he says. "However, it's hard to do since it implies a change in how documents get written. It's also very difficult to find all the common sections."

He added that DCL is working on technology that will allow you to go through the entire corpus of materials to find candidates for common sections. This, he says, will make content re-use far easier to implement.

DCLnews editorial
12/3/2003