If your organization creates service information, work instructions, installation operator guides, user guides, technical instructions, service manuals, or even service procedure bulletins – it’s time to rethink your process.
Let’s talk about how to make your service information accurate, relevant and accessible.
Defects in products happen, but in the case that a product needs to be taken apart- it’s important to do it the right way. This is especially true with today’s advanced complex products.
This is why organizations often don’t question why they’re managing mountains of paper-based technical publications. But what happens when a service call involves the use of particular tools that aren’t quite outlined in a service procedure manual?
Or when field circumstances turn out to be different than the initial service order and the correct manual may not have made it into a technician’s vehicle?
What happens when technical publications designed to guide service are no longer relevant due to product or tool changes? Despite best efforts – service, installation, and operation problems arise. These problems cause worker confusion, dissatisfied customers, and business risk.
Providing information that no longer applies to specific products forces operators to troubleshoot challenges based on assumptions and experience – or worse – inexperience. Paper-based and locally stored procedures, instructions, and guidelines also have a tendency to make work instructions difficult to find.
If your procedure documentation guidelines are disconnected, they are only hurting you.
The good news is, with the help of simple technology, any organization has an opportunity to rethink their service information. There has never been a better time to make service information accurate, relevant, and easily accessible.
The solution? Interactive digital work instructions.
How to make service information accurate
You might be surprised, but as a matter of fact, the first step towards achieving accurate service information involves using the content (such as Tech Pubs, Arbortext, DITA, XML, Images, etc.) that your organization has already created. Evaluate the current service information processes your organization has in place. For instance, you might currently be using paper documentation.
What’s the problem with paper documentation?
Once your documents are committed to paper alone, you can no longer assure their ongoing accuracy. The underlying information could have changed right after it was printed! Your information should (most definitely) include the latest version of technical publications and content (such as Creo Illustrate, Windchill, Service Information Manager, InDesign, FrameMaker, Oxygen, etc.) that you already have without the need for added latency or work for authoring, styling, and publishing.
When you’re in a digital work instruction environment, that environment is set up to draw from the most accurate up-to-date information available on your system. This is why the best possible way to ensure the accuracy of your service information is to move away from paper workflows and go to digital work instructions – instantaneous access, up-to-date information.
How to make service information relevant
The best way to ensure that your service information is relevant is by connecting your technical publications back to your engineering and manufacturing content creators.
What do we mean by that?
Your work instructions, service manuals, operation guides, and bulletins all come from files you have on hand. So why shouldn’t they directly connect to and show operators and technicians accurate and relevant information about what they do?!
Furthermore, if your current service processes involve the need to find and locate product information before your technicians start the job, you end up losing valuable time.
It’s time to change that.
The way to make your service information more relevant is to have your instructions take your technicians down a specific product path. Using visual work instructions will allow your service teams to get specific information and insights that directly pertain to what they need.
By implementing technology that can cross-reference technical publication content, you can be sure your service information will always be relevant no matter the task.
The technology available today even has features like ‘work process selects’, to route directly to the correct tech pub content. Even better, it also has the ability to navigate to cross-referenced content such as DITA, XML files, images and more!
Simple solutions on the market today can even provide service technicians and operators with the ability to immediately start on a service task. With the help of technology, such as a digital device or a handsfree headset, service technicians can instantly receive relevant work instructions at their fingertips… or eyeballs… by simply scanning a barcode.
Your service information should be accurate and timely, and the best way to make that possible is by directly connecting all the files you currently have! It’s that simple.
How to make service information accessible
Making service information more accessible has everything to do with the use of digital devices such as mobile or wearable devices.
By using mobile or wearable devices, workers have the ability to instantly connect directly to work processes and even existing tech pub source content. Every organization has the ability to make service info easily accessible to the extent that the company wants.
For instance, you can easily make any information accessible and relevant now with a connected Industrial IoT environment. By using Wi-Fi and cellular connections, technicians have the ability to connect online to whatever the most relevant information is.
Your path to better service information
Please contact us to see how Industrial AR can be used to connect and reuse existing technical publications and content. We have the know-how, technology, and team to help you take your digital transformation to the next level, decrease service and manufacturing errors, and improve the way you distribute technical information.
Watch this video to see EAC’s solution for converting work instructions to digital AR experiences with AR Instruct.
The aging workforce crisis is affecting field service companies in a huge way. Kris Oldland, a B2B author, wrote an article for Field Service News called The Aging Workforce Crisis Is Not Only Real But It’s Here – How Are We Going To Resolve It?. Oldland’s research found that 53% of field service companies believe that replacing an aging workforce is a challenge for their organization.
Here’s how we should be addressing the aging workforce – by protecting older generations.
Protecting older generations
According to a report written by the United States Senate on ‘America’s Aging Workforce’, challenges such as age discrimination, inadequate training opportunities, and working while managing health conditions and disabilities are making it difficult for older workers to thrive in the workplace. Not everyone is ready for retirement – whether it’s due to financial reasons or they’re just not ready to stop working. It is projected that by 2026, working individuals that are 55 and older will make up 24.8 percent of working Americans – which will account for almost one in every four American workers (United States Senate, America’s Aging Workforce).
So how can field service companies help protect older generations from losing their jobs due to these challenges? We don’t need to ‘replace’ the aging workforce – we can still leverage their vast amount of knowledge and experience. Service organizations should be leading the way by providing solutions for older generations to continue working by eliminating or at least significantly decreasing travel time and cost it takes to service equipment on-site.
How do you do this? Provide your employees with an augmented reality (AR) tool such as Vuforia Chalk.
What is PTC Vuforia Chalk?
PTC’s Vuforia Chalk is built on the Vuforia AR platform technology from PTC. You can draw digital annotations on your device that accurately anchor to physical objects in the real world so that the receiver of your communication through the app knows exactly how to solve the problem via your instructions.
Vuforia Chalk allows field service technicians to help customers without having to travel to get to them. Chalk is an app that empowers service technicians by providing them with instructions and guidance they need to quickly solve technical challenges. Both experts and technicians can accurately mark up live views to highlight details or guide multi-step solutions.

Chalk marks where you instruct on the screen, leaving ‘still’ marks where you’ve placed them, even if you’re moving your device around. You can move your device out of view, and your chalk marks will still be seen drawn where you put them.
AR is one of the fastest growing segments in the market, allowing Chalk to easily launch as an app that service companies are immediately attracted to. Organizations are seeing that the investment draws in new levels of workforce productivity and efficiency for those that can work remotely and cost-effectiveness for less money spent on travel.
How can AR help with remote assistance?
Older generations are easily able to learn PTC’s Vuforia augmented reality tools as something that can be incorporated into their service processes.
Our recent webinar called, Vuforia Chalk: Powerful Remote Guidance at your Fingertips, gathered valuable survey information from our attendees: 50% of our respondents told us that their service technicians on average travel 50-100 miles radius from where they work to get to service calls, and the other 50% of respondents told us that they travel more than 100 miles to service their customers.
Think of the costs incurred with that kind of travel. The back and forth communication, the talk with human resources to plan the trip; the expenses of a rental car and/or plane tickets; the time lost to work due to travel; et cetera. The list goes on and on. When, in reality, you can use a simple AR app remote assistance app such as Vuforia Chalk to problem-solve from the comfort of your own office or home.. or anywhere for that matter.
When we asked our webinar attendees if ‘the availability of an office-based remote-expert role would increase the retention of retiring technicians and their knowledge’ – Fifty percent said ‘Yes’, and the other fifty percent said ‘Maybe’. Become a leader in the field service industry and offer your aging workforce the chance to work remotely. After all, there’s a one in four chance that the aging worker could be your grandparent.

Download the free trial of PTC Vuforia Chalk today, to see if this could be a tool that could keep older generations from feeling any repercussions of the aging workforce. Contact us if you’re interested in Vuforia Chalk.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming the way companies design, manufacture, and service their products and manufacturing floors. ‘Service’ is one of the most notable areas to be impacted by this wave of technology and connected devices. Monitoring assets in the field and on the shop floor gives service technicians access to usage, error, and predictive analytics prior to a repair. As companies continue to adopt the IoT, more organizations are satisfying the prerequisites to easily deploy augmented reality for service.
With the convergence of the digital and physical worlds, manufacturers are using augmented reality as a tool to help improve their service capabilities. Augmented Reality (AR) can deliver the right information at the very moment that it’s needed on the manufacturing floor so that field service technicians and other factory workers can reduce errors, enhance efficiencies, and improve productivity. AR also allows for content to be presented in arguably the most contextual way possible. When accurate information is presented over real-world devices there is little room for error and misunderstanding.
If field service technicians aren’t available to be on-site for a critical situation, then technicians can remotely assist customers with the help of AR. Customers will be able to observe service manuals with interactive 3D animations to disassemble components or work on equipment with which they’re unfamiliar with. If the users need further help, then the experienced field service technician can walk users through instructions while steaming the user’s device view in real time.
Augmented Reality Barriers to Entry
Your service and parts information have to be accurate and up-to-date in order to fully benefit from an augmented reality investment. Making sure your organization has a reliable Service Lifecycle Management system in place is the first step to digital transformation. Without accurate information on parts and equipment, field service technicians could replace the wrong part or be confronted with an outdated, undocumented design.
In order to be labeled a “smart connected enterprise,” a company should have a strategy to connect all of their assets and data; this includes technical publications. Connected technical illustrations have the power to show the current status for every part and piece of equipment. For example, if a mechanic could see a 3D representation of a vehicle’s carburetor and view critical metrics it would help them understand the potential for repairs or future failure.
Your organization needs to be IoT ready – meaning that there needs to be a strategy in place to input sensors on products and equipment. The Internet of Things allows products and assets to send alerts to a maintenance system that assigns a field service technician to perform a repair. Without the sensors that relay information about the status of those parts, and accurate 3D representations, augmented reality devices would be useless because there would be no relevant or up-to-date information to leverage in the field.
The IoT and Augmented Reality are transforming service and enhancing the field service process. Check out EAC’s solutions to see how you can start using AR today.
In the last few weeks I’ve discussed the benefits and costs of customization. This week I will review deciding whether to customize or not. If you missed these posts, you can read them here:
So how can you weigh the benefits against the costs of customizing? If we examine the criteria outlined above, a general pattern emerges, which provides the key insight in making this decision:
Benefits mainly go to end users, and costs mainly go to developers and administrators.
Installations with large user bases, where the value of customizations can be maximized, are good candidates for customization. Also, organizations that have dedicated staff for maintaining the Arbortext system will have an easier time managing customized installations than organizations where maintenance and development is a part-time task for staff with other responsibilities.
In organizations that have a small number of users, it will be difficult to realize enough value in customizations to make it worth the expense of implementing them. In these instances, it makes sense to stick with a mostly out-of-the-box installation using a standard doctype like DITA or DocBook, possibly with some stylesheet adjustments to get the desired output appearance.
Consider standard features first.
With all software, you can get the most value from your investment if you maximize the use of its standard features. If you are new to the software or perhaps not leveraging everything the software offers, you should explore the best practices and benefits first to determine if customization is truly needed. With Arbortext, PTC recommends an implementation approach called “Value-ready Deployment” which leverages the value of Arbortext using standard features and recommended best practices to maximize the value to each customer before any customizations are made.
Also consider prepackaged add-ons.
EAC offers several prepackaged add-ons which add capabilities to the Arbortext platform at a lower cost than a customization. One of our add-ons is EAC QuickPubs.
QuickPubs allows users to create aesthetically pleasing Operator Guides, Service Manuals, and Parts Catalogs quickly while providing an easy way to style documents that fit your brand. If you decide to investigate customizing Arbortext for your environment, EAC can help you explore your options with a variety of prepackaged add-ons, training, and implementation services.
Transform the way you design and publish product information through QuickPubs, an EAC product for PTC Arbortext. For more information about QuickPubs, you can download the brochure here. Publish faster, cheaper, and better today!
In my last post, ‘The Benefits of Customization,’ I told you I would review the cost of customization in my next post. If you missed it, you can find it here:
Of course, the benefits of customization don’t come without some associated costs. Here are some examples of the cost of customizing PTC Arbortext:
Development Costs
The most obvious cost is the cost of initially developing and testing the customization code. This will vary based on how extensive the customizations are. Also, don’t forget to keep maintenance costs in mind. Bug fixing, adding new features, and adapting customizations to changing requirements all require additional investment.
Version Lock-In
When you develop customizations, you generally work with a specific version of Arbortext. Depending on how extensive the customizations are, there is a chance that some part of the customization will break when you upgrade your Arbortext software to a new release version. In that case, you have two choices: either spend the resources to update the customization for the new Arbortext version, or commit to remaining with an out-of-date version of Arbortext to keep your customizations running.
Proprietary User Skills
With customization, you will need to take user training into account. For new features that don’t come out-of-the-box, you will have to develop your own training and support materials, and make sure your end users are up to speed on how to use the new features. In addition to the direct costs, this can also make recruiting new staff more challenging. There is a lot of DITA expertise in the marketplace, which you can leverage if you are using standard DITA. But if you are using a custom doctype and customized Arbortext Editor interface, you may not be able to get the same advantage from potential employees’ previous experience with XML editing or with Arbortext.
Technical Support Complications
PTC’s tech support staff know the base products quite well, and can help troubleshoot problems with out-of-the-box installations pretty quickly. However, with a heavily customized environment, troubleshooting can be more challenging, for PTC tech support as well as for yourself. In some cases, it may take extra time to determine whether a problem is due to a bug in the base Arbortext software, or something wrong with your customization code, or some kind of interaction between the two. In some cases, PTC’s advice for resolving the problem may boil down to “remove the customization.”
EAC has created a tool to help eliminate some of these costs allowing you to publish faster, cheaper, and better. QuickPubs is an EAC product for PTC Arbortext that removes the cost of development and provides a user-friendly interface.
While Arbortext comes with some publishing capabilities right out of the box, most users will acknowledge that they often need to customize the document stylesheets to meet their publishing standards. Customizing the stylesheets isn’t difficult, but it often requires prior training or hiring someone with the appropriate skilled and experience, both of which have an impact to turnaround time and cost. EAC has packaged attractive stylesheets for Operator Guides, Service Manuals, and Part Catalogs into QuickPubs so you can publish manuals that look as good as your products from day one. Should you need to modify the document stylesheet, QuickPubs also offers an easy interface to customize the style layout and formatting with a few clicks.
Stay tuned for the next post where I will discuss things to consider when deciding to customize or not.
If you would like to learn more about EAC QuickPubs and how you can publish faster, cheaper, and better, download the brochure here!
This is part one of a three part series regarding PTC Arbortext, deciding whether to customize or not. In this series, we will discuss the benefits of customization, the costs of customization, and deciding whether to customize or not.
You’ll often hear of DITA in the technical documentation world. DITA stands for ‘Darwin Information Typing Architecture’ -it’s an XML-based open standard for structuring, developing, managing, and publishing content. Quite the mouthful huh? What you need to know about DITA is that it leverages XML to be used as a way of writing and storing your data so you can manage it like an asset. What does it have to do with PTC’s Arbortext? PTC was the first company to ever deliver a complete DITA solution – one where organizations can finally start to maximize their investment in service lifecycle management.
One of the most fundamental questions you have to face when considering an Arbortext implementation is whether to use the technical documentation software out of the box or develop customizations to adapt the software to your specific use cases and work processes.
In practice, this is not so much of an either/or decision, as a how-much decision. In other words, nearly every implementation has some amount of customization, even if it’s just tweaking a composition stylesheet to add your own appearance specifications to the composed output. For some applications, where one of the standard doctypes such as DITA or DocBook is adequate, that’s all you need. For other applications, you may want to add custom features, user interface elements such as toolbars and custom dialogs, a tailored doctype or schema to support specific data requirements, connections to other enterprise systems such as ERP systems, and so on.
Adapting Arbortext software to your specific business environment can provide a number of advantages. Here are some examples where customization can add value to your implementation:
Author Efficiency
Custom features and user interface controls allow the author to work more efficiently.
Example: if authors frequently need to change one type of element into another similar element, then adding a toolbar button and/or keyboard shortcut to trigger the operation can let authors do it with a single click or key press, as opposed to using the Change Markup dialog.
Workflow Integration
Custom integration with software can streamline processes in the workflow.
Example: Suppose you have part data stored in an ERP system, and you are writing support documents associated with the part data. In a stock Arbortext installation, you might need to export the part data as an Excel spreadsheet, and then copy portions of the exported data in Excel to paste into the XML document in Arbortext. In contrast, a customization could allow authors to click a toolbar button, make a few quick selections in a dialog box, and automatically extract, format, and insert the part data in the correct location in the document.
New Capabilities
Customizations allow you to add new features to Arbortext Editor.
Example: Suppose you have a metric that you want to track on your documents that depends on the number of specific elements in each document, such as graphic elements. You can easily add a feature that would count instances of a specific element and report that for a document. You could also generate a report for a set of documents found in a directory tree or a folder in a content management system (CMS). This would let authors get this information directly within Arbortext Editor, without having to switch to an external tool to do the analysis/reporting.
This publishing engine software can be customized in a number of ways, and frequently we see users customizing their stylesheets to make them look better or compliant with their publishing standards. Arbortext stylesheets are used to publish documents that have consistent styling and formatting, no matter who authored the document. Sometimes these stylesheet customizations can be significant and complex, but often we see a need to make simple modifications to the fonts, logos, and page margins. EAC QuickPubs provides users an easy way to make those simple style modifications and create great looking documents.
Stay tuned for the next post where we discuss the cost of customization.
If you’re looking for ways to adapt your environment to fit your organizations needs, EAC QuickPubs may be for you. It’s an add-on designed to style documents that fit your organizations brand at a lower cost than a customization to PTC Arbortext. You can create aesthetically pleasing part manuals, owner’s guides, service manuals and more with ease. Publish fast, cheaper, and better today!
Transform the way you design and publish product information through QuickPubs, an EAC product for PTC Arbortext. For more information about QuickPubs contact us. Publish faster, cheaper, and better today!