XML-Based Technology Achieves Strategic Advantages

The Challenge
U.S. Air Force Documentation Support

Northrop Grumman Technical Services (NGTS) saw a tremendous business opportunity and challenge. The military needed to move to advanced, XML-based technology. Creating, maintaining, and updating mission critical technical manuals and service documentation for massive defense, aerospace, and other initiatives is daunting.

When the company won a contract to update documentation for the Air Force's venerable E-3 Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft, the documentation made up some 300,000 pages of legacy content.

Northrop Grumman Technical Services' solution was the first electronic organic publishing and worldwide distribution capability in the Air Force's history. To deliver it, the company needed a technology partner that could provide the required contentmanagement and publishing technologies.

"We had a lot of people to convince," says Bruce Brooke, business development manager, Northrop Grumman Technical Services. "But we knew that XyEnterprise's technology could make it work."

Throughout the lifecycle of the program, many commercial SGML-based authoring, conversion, content management, and transformation products were tested, implemented, and changed. One product remained consistent within the production publishing suite – XyEnterprise XML Professional Publisher (XPP). XPP's flexibility in developing accurate formatting styles, and completely automated revision and change package processing eliminated over 50% of the production time previously needed to produce updated publications.

From the start, the program's goals were to reduce technical data sustainment costs, leverage COTS technology, improve data accuracy, and minimize the change cycle lead time from 180 days to less than 30 days.

Mission accomplished – the AWACS program has completely eliminated paper distribution for all of its Illustrated Parts Breakdown (IPB) publications, and now delivers Interactive Electronic Technical Manuals (IETMs) to its users worldwide.

XPP has been used to manage and produce 278 AWACS Technical Orders, comprised of approximately 174,000 pages. During the peak production, over 5,000 revision/change pages were being produced monthly by a staff of only five.

Northrop Grumman Technical Services and XyEnterprise continue to provide state-of-the-art content and publishing solutions for other key Air Force projects and divisions, including the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program. This includes some 200,000 pages of content, including work cards, checklists, work packages, work unit code manuals, operations and maintenance manuals, and Illustrated Parts Breakdown (IPB's).

The Next Big Opportunity
Warner Robins Air Logistics Center

Following their AWACS success, Northrop Grumman Technical Services was contracted to upgrade organically supported publication systems at the Warner Robins Air Logistics Center (WR-ALC) at the Warner Robins Air Force Base in Georgia. The WR-ALC manages Air Force inventory for the F15, C-5, and C130 weapons systems, as well as all avionics and electronic warfare components.

The company continued to progressively expand its Air Force support through the implementation of Warner Robins Integrated Data for Maintenance (WR IDM), their largest and most complex production publishing environment designed, integrated, and supported by Northrop Grumman Technical Services – Oklahoma City.

Scaled to manage the majority of WRALC's publications (approximately 1M pages/year, with peak monthly production at 50,000 pages), the WR IDM system leverages the complete XyEnterprise suite of high volume production publishing and content management software. The WR IDM architecture consists of multiple XPP servers and production clients as well as a large repository of digital publication source data, managed by Contenta, XyEnterprise's content management software solution.

This fully integrated content management and publishing solution has allowed Warner Robins to realize some true quantifiable metrics for this project:

• Management of 1 million pages of technical documentation (up from 250,000)
• Production of 60,000 pages per month (up from 5,000)
• Cost per page has been cut in half
• Re-work has been reduced from 10% to 2% for monthly production
• Quality and timeliness of deliverable documents has improved by 25%
• Customer satisfaction is now extremely high

Northrop Grumman Technical Services believes that its systems and/or programs now "touch" (either edit or manage) some 75% of all existing Air Force content. Joining forces with XyEnterprise content management and publishing technology is a win-win for both companies, Brooke says. "XyEnterprise has the most solid, complete suite of products available for the intense documentation requirements of the U.S. military."

Northrop Grumman Technical Services
Herndon, VA
ts.northropgrumman.com

XyEnterprise
Wakefield, MA
xyenterprise.com