If Picker's Questor expert system was going to deliver the benefits planned, it would have to support on-line electronic documentation. Picker had nearly a hundred products, each with its own technical-documentation set that included as many as nine three-ring binders. Documentation sets cost an average of $500 per product line, and with over 900 field engineers who needed to be kept current on as many as six products, the costs added up fast.
Updating the paper manuals was cumbersome, and, in practice, it wasn't unusual for a field engineer's documentation to be out-of-revision. These considerations only added incentive to go on-line.
By the second quarter of 1993, Picker had assessed the service organization's immediate document management needs and began ex
ploring electronic solutions. Within three months, it had narrowed the vendors to four prospects and began experimenting in-house with on-line product documentation.
Questor would be called upon to support wave-form diagrams, circuit schematics, and other figures, in addition to text. ``We realized we needed graphics that could be viewed with the text, we realized we needed to let field engineers make notes on the documents, and we realized we needed to be able to secure the documentation,'' said Larry Stanich, who is training program manager at Picker.
Stanich had his technical staff develop a limited prototype based on Asymetrix's (Bellevue, WA) ToolBook, which was already being used in-house. While this effort showed they were headed in the right direction and demonstrated the value of on-line hyperdocumentation for Questor, the prototype platform was simply not scalable.
While three vendors--Folio (Provo, UT), InfoAccess (Bellevue, WA), and Interleaf (Waltham, MA)--were final contende
rs to provide the software to support Picker's on-line field-documentation system, Stanich and his colleagues selected Interleaf. ``It wasn't so much that the other vendors couldn't support our needs,'' said Stanich. ``It was the fact that Interleaf met all our requirements in a much more elegant way.''
Early this year, Picker purchased Interleaf 5 and WorldView Press, which support document authoring and the conversion of existing documents into Interleaf format, respectively. The company also purchased a document ``filter'' package, Filtrex, from Blueberry Software (Sebastapol, CA). This was used to translate text and graphics into Interleaf format--in particular, WordPerfect text documents that included merged graphics.
A Document Management System
While the field engineers' laptops would serve as the platforms to let users ``read'' the electronic documents, an ``authoring'' environment was also needed. For this, Picker bought two Sun SparcStation IPX machines--each with a 424-MB hard
drive and 64 MB of RAM.
Most of Picker's paper-based documentation was available in its native (i.e., word processor, graphics, or CAD) on-line format. However, some of it was not. To accommodate those portions, Picker bought a Fujitsu M3096G 11- by 17-inch scanner with an automatic document feeder. Scanning software--ScanWorX from Xerox Imaging Systems--and a dedicated printer rounded out the authoring environment. Both Sun SparcStations were connected to the company's NetWare network.
Early in 1993, Picker spent $25,000 on hardware and another $125,000 on software from Interleaf. The big-ticket item was the lowest-priced: the viewer licenses for the 900 field engineers. During the second quarter of 1993, Dave Randall (communications technology specialist at Picker) and his colleagues went about learning how to use the Interleaf software and how to restructure Picker's documents to take advantage of the hyperlinked environment. These experiences yielded guidelines and practices on converting Pi
cker documents for use in WorldView Press.
Paper Hyperdocuments
Picker (like many other companies) decided to start by making each on-line document identical in appearance to its paper counterpart, for two reasons. First, this made navigating hyperdocumentation as familiar an experience as using paper, and thus made the transition from the three-ring binders to the laptop as straightforward as possible for Picker's field engineers. Second, it kept the paper and on-line materials synchronized in format.
For Picker, the experience of converting documents from paper to hyperdocuments simulating paper has been a bit trying. In theory, converting a document for viewing consists of passing it through a software filter and installing content-appropriate hyperlinks. In practice, as much as 5 minutes per page is spent making sure that every on-line page looks exactly like its paper partner.
``The filtering package and Interleaf do an excellent job of converting, but here and there you have
a tab that is off, or a hard return, or maybe there's some text that got `sucked up' into a table cell,'' explained Randall. Correcting those things is the most time-consuming part of the conversion process.
Before moving forward on the electronic field-service documentation project, Picker needed to resolve the issue of confidentiality of data on the mobile laptops. The company spent millions of dollars developing its knowledge base and its service and product documentation. It had to ensure that unauthorized access to the information would not be possible if a laptop were lost or stolen.
To accomplish this, Picker developed its own security system, Koan. It includes password protection to limit access and data compression to render data on the disk unintelligible. Encryption keys are updated by communication with central dispatch and expire in several days. Files are decrypted on-the-fly and are unlocked only for TestView and WorldView Press applications (which operate at suboperating-system l
evels). Copy, Print, and Move commands are disabled when these applications are running. If any tampering is detected, the keys self-destruct, rendering the hard disk data inaccessible.
Photograph: Larry Stanich and Dave Randall of Picker
Supporting Questor with Electronic Documents
