For design engineers in the Aerospace and Defence (A&D) industry, time is at a premium. Alongside their core engineering responsibilities, they are expected to provide input into the vast volumes of internal and customer-facing technical documentation that A&D companies need to produce. Mekon’s research shows that engineers can spend as much as 15 per cent of their time dealing with documentation. These experts are under pressure to be more productive without an increase in resources, yet their documentation process often receives little to no investment or attention.
While there are technology standards specifically designed for the A&D industry which make document creation easier and more efficient, companies often fail to use them. The industry standard S1000D helps connect engineering processes with documentation, leading to major efficiency gains and cost savings. Yet many companies only implement the standard if it’s been mandated in their contract. Companies that only implement S1000D to fulfill contractual obligations are unlikely to understand how to use it to its full potential, resulting in considerably less efficiency and higher costs than usual.
These are the urgent issues facing engineers whose firms still cling to old-fashioned and inefficient documentation workflows, which take an unstructured approach to the way that they create, manage, use and deliver data. This is especially true when dealing with multiple information inputs and outputs, such as multiple equipment components and contributors feeding into many documents for various audiences. These demands are further multiplied when documentation must be delivered in various formats, such as print, web, PDF or other types of media.
The crux of the problem lies in the process of moving content around between teams, and is exacerbated by poor support from tools. Whenever a design engineer creates a new innovation, it immediately creates the need to update supporting information for that design variant. Engineers are the initial source for this content which is then passed to the technical documentation team to prepare externally-facing documents. External documents are reviewed extensively, and it is often at this stage that errors in the content are discovered. However, corrections rarely get made in the original source materials, meaning that mistakes are reused when variant designs are made or components of designs are reused, only to get caught again next time around.
Engineers thus spend much of their time cutting and pasting bits of content from old sources, with no tracking of the source or easy access to approved content held in technical publications. Because traditional publishing systems lack automation, all these processes have to be done manually – an extremely laborious process for design engineers and authors alike. Typical jobs include searching for changes within a set of documents, locating all the out-of-date files, updating shared content across all variants and versions, and re-writing or re-formatting documents for different contexts. Not only is this extremely time-consuming; it also gives greater opportunities for errors to creep in.
Mekon has helped many leading A&D firms to simplify their content management through its Aerospace and Defence division. Mekon’s research found that design engineers who help to produce technical documentation are typically wasting between 30 and 50 per cent of their document-related time on unnecessary overheads instead of creating content. Mekon Aerospace and Defence helps its clients to stop this haemorrhaging of time and money by taking a holistic view of a company’s approach to content and document management.
Mekon works closely with an organisation’s staff to gather priorities, goals and a picture of the business from a process and priorities point of view. They then analyse the information gathered and deliver a management-oriented presentation. This report raises staff awareness of content issues and options; for example, showing how S1000D can be properly implemented to improve efficiency. The report enables decision makers to see how, why and where existing content creation, management and delivery strategies can be improved, saving design engineers time which they could spend on their core responsibilities.
Taking a structured, strategic approach can slash content budgets by as much as 50 per cent, delivering a clear return on investment for managers and significantly improved productivity for engineers. There are also numerous ‘soft gains’ such as more diversified, more structured content; different navigation options; content syndication and change notifications – all of which will make life easier for design engineers.
