Introduction
Traditionally, manufacturers released their technical documentation in paper format, outlining not just the technical information about the product but also information about repairs in case of failures or breakdowns. But this paper format was engulfed with challenges more than the problems it solved. With the future versions being released in PDFs, the paper format challenges were addressed to an extent. However, as manufacturers leveraged technology, the market became increasingly disruptive. There was a need to implement a solution that not only caters to the challenges of their existing service management and technical documentation but was also is a scalable solution that could act as a centralized solution to their service department workforce.
Technology has been pivotal in the future growth of industries in this highly competitive business environment. Today, manufacturers are constantly on the lookout to implement solutions to enhance the user experience for both their customers and their workforce. With the business landscape becoming disruptive, interactive electronic technical manuals are due for a revamp to incorporate AI, AR, VR, and many such upcoming, new-age technologies. The major contributor behind this implementation is the enhancement in collaboration in the service departments, improving the user experience and ensuring a smooth knowledge transfer and accessibility for stakeholders.
What are IETMs and Their Challenges?
As the name suggests, interactive electronic technical manuals are comprehensive digital repositories of all the technical information about a product. The main use is to provide access to information and knowledge, as swiftly as possible.
With such importance, these manuals are crucial for any manufacturer. Let us see what are the key features of these AI manuals:
• Integration of Multimedia: To ensure users get all the relevant information within the manual itself, OEMs offer integrated rich media in these comprehensive documents. This means anytime a service technician is performing repairs or maintenance activities on a vehicle, they can access all the information from the manual. These manuals can have embedded images, videos and/or documents to ensure complete information access.
• Interactive Elements: As the technicians will be referring to these documents more often, companies need to ensure the knowledge in these manuals are easy to grasp and understand. There is integration of simulations and 3D models to ensure a reduced learning curve for the technicians. This also means the service departments will be able to solve their customer issues quickly and with fewer errors.
• Search Functionality: Technicians need to search for information within a document and the results are required quickly. The search function should be able to provide them with the flexibility of different searches such as searching the entire document, the index, on-page search, and more. These AI manuals are comprehensive – some even extend to a whopping thirty thousand to forty thousand pages! Searching for the right information in less time is crucial for the technicians.
• AI Awareness: Service manuals, when integrated with AI, offer a great deal of features for the technicians. As AI is an evolving tool, it gets better with use. An example would be the availability of dynamic questions available to technicians on the basis of the recent usage patterns of the manual. As these questions are completely dynamic in nature, they show trends and patterns in their use. These questions change with the passing of time. The AI features also enable users to generate summaries of any questions asked in the manual. Speech-to-text, Text-to-speech are also integrated within the AI manuals.
These advantages enable the service departments with a better view and access of information. Not just that, these AI features in IETMs give in-depth analytics and patterns in the backend too. This ensures service departments are better equipped with the tools to offer better and fast service to their customers.
The challenges will always remain for every technological advancement incorporated in the manuals. Even with these integrations and advanced functionalities, there are challenges that service departments face. Let us see what these challenges are:
• Creation of Content: This is perhaps the most challenging aspect on a global scale right now. As the content created will need to cater to the entire service department, it needs to be accurate, comprehensive, and engaging. To ensure a high degree of customer service, the content quality is crucial. Businesses need to ensure that there are updates on the content and they are taking measures to improve the quality of content integrated with IETMs.
• Management of Information: Manuals are comprehensive documents with every bit of technical information about products. This would also contain various scenarios of troubleshooting in case of technical issues. In such cases, the business also needs information about the latest issues its customers are facing and would also need to come up with a resolution to such issues or challenges. In the automotive industry, there are service updates which are given to the service technicians in case of any such situations. The business needs to organize vast amounts of technical information and data efficiently.
• User Experience: Arguably, the most important point in this entire list, the priority of OEMs is to ensure a higher user experience. This is possible by enhancing the intuitiveness of the manuals. Businesses need to constantly work towards improving what they currently offer. The navigation of information is also important as it would directly impact the time taken for the service operations or maintenance activities. If the navigation takes a long time, the delivery of service would be delayed which would result in diminished user experience and vice versa.
• Updates: This is also a major contributor to improvements in interactive electronic technical manuals as they provide the latest information about any updates or changes in the product from a service and technical aspect. Products are continuously evolving and these updates need to be in sync with the product manuals. These updates are important and the communication of these changes holds equal importance. The communication of these updates can happen through these technical documents.
What Advantages Does AI Bring to Improve IETMs?
Artificial intelligence is the talk of the town these days and everything that we experience is utilizing some or the other degree of AI in them. Be it our phones or computers, everything has AI. The incorporation of AI is to offer higher flexibility and access to information for users. Let us see what advantages AI brings in these comprehensive technical documents:
• Intelligent Content Creation:
Natural Language Processing (NLP): With AI, the technical documentation gets better as it can manage and analyze the technical information to generate content that is relatable and readable for humans. Such an effort reduces the time that would otherwise be dedicated to creating such content. This ensures that information availability is never challenged and the service departments are equipped with the information they need to perform service or maintenance activities, thereby improving customer satisfaction.
Analysis of Images and Videos: Utilizing the AIs technological prowess, businesses can benefit by automatic extraction of information from the images and videos. This benefit catalyzes the generation of captions, interactive elements, and captions. By automating such processes, AI can ensure streamlined and smooth operations related to the management of such information.
Content Optimization: One of the primary aspects of any interactive electronic technical manual, this dynamic feature studies and analyzes user behavior. The results of such analyses are the dynamic optimization of the content structure and its presentation. This has immense application in technical documentation as there would be multiple users and the data collected for analysis would be huge. This analysis would enable the users to save time by engaging with the piece of content that would relate most to their needs.
• Enhanced Retrieval of Information:
Semantic Search: AI has inherent features to analyze user behavior and implement such analysis into action. Users, when searching using queries, also train the AI models to accumulate data for understanding the search queries, thus enabling the AI manual to be equipped with relevant and accurate results.
Predictive Search: Predicting search information makes manuals intelligent and interactive. Through such activities, the AI manuals can be equipped with anticipating the search patterns and suggest relevant information to users proactively.
• Personalized User Experience:
User Modeling: AI has the capability to create user profiles based on the analysis of the behavior and patterns of the existing users. Through this activity, the AI model can enable the personalization of information based on the users logging in to the system. Such dynamic and agile features make IETMs a powerhouse of relevant information and make users engage with the system in a better way.
Augmented Reality (AR): When troubleshooting complex issues, expertise is a crucial factor for any service department. Interactive electronic technical manuals can be powered by augmented reality with the help of AI and can act as a training tool to ensure the information is available for the users and the same can be used to train technicians in case of complex or recurring issues. This saves time and effort for the training teams and ensures a smooth user experience for both the technicians and the customers.
• Automated Content Management and Updates:
Change Management: Through strategic integration of AI in manuals, businesses can enable these models to automatically track the changes or updates in the product and update the IETM accordingly.
Validation of Content: Once the content is managed and checked for any changes, the AI model also has to verify the consistency of the said content. This can be done with AI manuals through their existing capabilities. As the AI model can understand the user intent and behavior, it becomes easy for the model to validate the content that is updated.
Control of Versions: As any document is updated, the version needs to be updated. For this, the content changes need to be tracked and ensured that they are formatted in the existing formatting. The AI in IETM can manage this efficiently and as soon as the content is updated, the version of the document is updated to ensure transparency on the documents.
• Predictive Maintenance:
Analysis of Data: When integrated with the existing diagnostic tools, the interactive electronic technical manuals can ensure efficient tracking and analysis of various sensors and data to predict maintenance and service activities. In the industry today, especially automotive, there are diverse crucial activities that would be hampered when there are sudden shutdowns and downtime. This can be taken care of with the help of the AI models integrated with the service manuals.
What are The Key Factors We Drive from AI Manuals?
As we have experienced the growth of technical documents from traditional management on paper to PDF manuals to AI manuals, we see a stark increase in security and content management. As these are crucial documents and the entire service department relies on them, it is essential that adequate security measures are implemented to ensure data privacy and prevent unauthorized access to information.
With that being said, businesses today need to implement measures to ensure the availability of data. This can be done through cross-platform availability and digital rights management. Through the data accumulated in the backend, analytics can be driven that showcase the usage patterns. These usage patterns can help businesses to form trends and perform analysis of all these metrics. Such in-depth information makes the AI manuals a scalable and comprehensive solution for businesses.
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