Interactive Electronic Technical Manual

Interactive Electronic Technical Manuals (IETMs) have long been used in maintaining and diagnosting Aerospace, defence, medical and many other industry sectors.

IETMs provide an array of benefits as described below, but none seem more important than putting better and smarter documentation into the hands of the people who will benefit most–repair and maintenance technicians.

Technocraft's standards-based approach to IETM creation allows for deployment in any medium, including CD-ROM or Web delivery systems. Because we develop to support enterprise-wide support chain solutions, companies can quickly and easily roll out their IETMs into their aftermarket and support operations. They will also see an immediate impact on their bottom line through increases in efficiency, revenue, and customer satisfaction.

Key IETM Benefits:
       Reduced downtime
       Reduced user man-hours time
       Reduced warranty costs
       Reduced printing expenses
       Reduced distribution costs
       Eliminates change pages
       Lower cost per user

Over the years, Technocraft has produced all the different classes of IETMs, but have recently focusing on Class 3 to Class 5 IETM capabilities.

Paper (Class 0) Conventionally printed technical manuals–paper only

Electronically Indexed Page Images (Class 1) Page images Raster, not live text and may include linking from Table of Contents to specified page (very inexpensive).

Electronic Scrolling Documents (Class 2) Page oriented, but live ASCII text with SGML/XML tags. May use hypertext to other related areas within the document and may include multimedia.

Linear-Structured IETMs (Class 3) Linear-structured information utilizing SGML or XML, yet still resembling a paper document. Most often viewed as an indexed PDF file.

Hierarchically Structured IETMs (Class 4) Hierarchically structured and specifically authored for IETM presentation. This class of IETM provides for robust cross-referencing between different, but related, data. The data is commonly tagged using SGML or XML and stored in a relational or object-oriented database.

Integrated Process IETMs (Class 5) This class lets the manual interact with different processes. These processes may include expert systems, test equipment, prime equipment diagnostics, intrusive and remote diagnostics, etc.