Industy4.0 and S1000D Technical Publications

Industy4.0 and S1000D Technical Publications

Working in industries that are technologically advancing at a rapid pace, we face new challenges around how we produce, leverage, and deploy technical publications.

Producing technical publications today requires production skills beyond the written word; we need to understand what is going on behind the page. More in-depth than the maintainers’ traditional interaction with technical content. We need to design and configure content to match sophisticated platforms and environmental conditions. Producers are now more conscious of data integration and deployment requirements on multi-partner and supplier projects.

Our domains have collectively identified the challenges we will face over the coming years. Retiring skills, lack of new engineering talent, and ever complex products and configurations will deliver maintainer and operator challenges for us all.

Step-in Industry 4.0, the ability to access, deploy, and leverage a vast array of data from multiple systems supporting our platforms.

Due to the sheer volume of performance data now produced, we must have systems and abilities to analyse and predict what is happening with our platforms, well before a product shows signs of failure. Connected platforms are generating terabytes of analytically available content that may show early signs of fatigue or failure.

The connected platform can now trigger events via Health Monitoring Systems and the relevant connected technical publication. It is leveraging the content ‘behind the page’ triggering maintenance and logistic processes before the platform returns from an operation.

Augmented Reality (AR) is changing the way we can make available depths of information to our users and maintainers. If Health Monitoring Systems can leverage information behind the page, AR allows us to leverage content ‘above the page’.

The use of AR is now growing in popularity, specifically in the maintenance environment. The use-case for AR has always been evident in learning and training environments and less so in the maintainers one.

Given industries have now widely accepted that skill-levels are retiring and reducing leaving an inevitable void that technology will need to fill.

Augmented Reality is a capability to help capture skill and know-how before it retires as well as guiding maintenance processes and bringing information to life beyond traditional presented content.

Download the whitepaper on HMS and tech pubs

Take our survey on AR, and we’ll send you a link to a free tutorial on bringing a tech pub to life with AR.