Best IETM Services provider in India
Technical manuals have a long history and have been published in many formats over the years, starting from physical paper copies produced in printing presses. However, when it comes to talking about manuals for large machines such as aircrafts, it must be noted that they required thousands of pages of literature that occupied a lot of space due to the vast number of highly complex parts that they are comprised of.
With significant technological advancement, these have been progressively replaced by various forms of electronic versions: from Simple PDFs, to user-friendly “Interactive Electronic Technical Manuals” (IETM).
The Benefits of IETM
Both for those creating the manuals and for those consuming them, the conception of IETM had many benefits. The idea that a manual could be electronic means that there is increased diversity in how the manual can be viewed; rather than physically, they are able to be viewed on many devices such as smartphones, computers and tablets, making them portable as well. Due to this, they also have highly usable interfaces with detailed tables of content that are hyperlinked, so any information can be easily found without having to navigate chronological pages in physical form.
Thus, the IETM strayed away from page-oriented manuals, and was instead navigated by what information is needed; as consumers access manuals for different reasons and often need to access information fast, this proved to be far more useful. A final but key benefit of IETM was the ability to record the history of changes made to the manual; manufacturers are required to make updates and republish manuals frequently, and the IETM approach made this very easy.
IETM systems and how they have evolved over time can be broken down into five classes which represent how technology has advanced over the years to the kinds of manuals we would expect to see in this day and age.