Everyone plays a part — some small, some large — and every job includes, you guessed it, documentation. Industry experts often quip that the paperwork for a commercial airliner weighs more than the aircraft. Consider the pilot and co-pilot. They prepare for each flight armed with a flight bag stuffed with documents — navigation charts, flight manuals, checklists and performance data for the particular aircraft. As aircraft have become increasingly complex, so too have the supporting data and documentation. As a result, airlines are turning increasingly to automation — to help the pilots prepare for the flight, to help the ground crew ready the aircraft for takeoff, and to help the operations and maintenance staff perform scheduled and routine maintenance.

Aircraft maintenance is an especially content-centric process. The typical aircraft comprises thousands of systems, subsystems and parts, each with its own documentation. Moreover, these parts are often changed over time; an engineering change or new safety requirement may modify the part, necessitating a change in the related documentation.

Safety is paramount in commercial aviation, so federal regulations require that the documentation be comprehensive and up to date. Like other airlines, Houston-based Continental Airlines faced the problem of ensuring that its 4,000 maintenance personnel, spread over four hubs and 23 other maintenance facilities, receive and read critical updates to maintenance documents. In the past, circulating such changes to documentation was a largely manual, and thus time-consuming and costly, process.

Updating the documents and distributing them was only half the problem, though, according to Larry Strykowski, director of technical operations for Continental. The tougher part was ensuring that each of the 3,500 mechanics and 500 inspectors had read the documents. In the past, with paper distribution, crews had to take time out - often traveling to another facility where the documents were housed — to read and sign the documents. Getting 100 percent compliance was difficult.

What was needed, Strykowski says, was improved automation for producing the documents and "an automatic and centralized way of auditing the process to make sure everyone did what he or she was supposed to do." Working with Xerox Global Services, Continental developed and implemented a system that would route a document through five to six approval points automatically, and then distribute electronic documents to each maintenance facility.

Strykowski notes that the electronic distribution alone has yielded substantial savings, eliminating many shipping charges. But the real savings have stemmed from the crews being able to view the documents anywhere, eliminating much travel time. Saving 4,000 employees 15 minutes per day adds up.

For Continental, the real benefit of the solution is, in a word, compliance. The best part of this story, though, is how relatively easy it was to implement the new procedure. Continental had two existing systems to integrate with the new solution: Documentum for document management and a proprietary time and attendance application. Continental and Xerox Global Services developed Web services interfaces to these systems while integrating Microsoft Word 2003 as the document-authoring application.

Continental became a beta user of the new version of Microsoft Word so that it could use the XML-based Word format this version introduced. The airline developed its own schema, and having XML as the underlying markup ensured that the documents could be displayed on a variety of electronic devices. Following the authoring stage, content is sent over the Web to Documentum, which routes documents in progress and "locks in" content versions.

Once the documents are reviewed and approved, they are distributed to the mechanics and inspectors using a second Web service, which derives its workflow information from the time and attendance application. The service routes the documents to the intended mechanics and inspectors, and issues reports for supervisors telling them which personnel are scheduled to review documents.

Strykowski says the reporting has been extremely useful, especially with the company's mobile workforce of mechanics, who often change facilities and shifts. "A shift supervisor gets e-mail notifications when people need to read certain documents," Strykowski explains, adding that the 20-day process for getting mechanics and inspectors to review and sign off on documents has been cut to 10 days.

Continental estimates the XML-based system will save it $700,000 to $800,000 annually in direct costs, and even more by keeping the company in compliance and its aircraft flying safely.

Bill Trippe is president of New Millennium Publishing, Boston, a consultancy specializing in electronic publishing, content management, SGML and XML.