Documentation processing is alive and well! For many, that’ s not a surprise. Once a project is completed, many external parameters and factors can impact the documentation during the product life cycle. A change of parts, a tool, a reference number or a consumable, or a customer request or a new normative or regulatory constraint, are all reasons why documentation has to be modified and/or updated (RFU, reason for update).

The issue is therefore no longer whether or not the publication assets will be impacted over the 20 to 30 years of product use, but to visualize precisely and quickly where this will be the case.

THE IMPACT ANALYSIS

In most cases, modifications are in response to typical cases that have an impact on the publication assets, such as updating a tool, which may, depending on the case, have a knock-on effect on a set of procedures.

At best, a modification can be limited to updating the reference number of a tool. However, as mentioned above, changing a tool, even if it has the same purpose as the previous one, can have an impact on the way certain tasks are carried out.

Impact analysis meets the important need of quickly and easily identifying all the data modules that reference the tool in order to analyze them and, if necessary, assign them in batches to specialists who can update them.

This sort of impact can be extended to any change in support elements required to carry out tasks, be it an item, an ingredient, test equipment, a change of location, a warning message, a hazard, a sign, a name, etc.

In a system where configuration management is an important element, the Search and Analytics module allows you to search for specific configurations and provide a list of document objects corresponding to your configuration criteria.

MASS CHECKS

In the same way, the Search and Analytics module allows for mass checking of your publication assets. In the case of a modification affecting a greater or lesser number of documentary units (DMs), this ensures that all the documentary units that need to be modified have been modified, and that the entire revised content corresponds to the impact analysis.

It is also possible to perform a search to extract Data Modules with their RFUs (reasons for update) to ensure that none have been forgotten. In fact, an exhaustive list of all the RFUs per documentary unit can be obtained.

ADVANCED CONTEXTUAL SEARCHES

Another way to take advantage of this module, besides impact analysis, is to develop and perform contextual searches on the XML structure of the document, such as searching for a word in an ‘Abbreviation’ tag rather than searching for that word independently of its semantics.

The Search and Analytics module, a quiet revolution, increases the publication-asset search and analysis capabilities tenfold. It offers new perspectives to users and managers, who can now easily and quickly anticipate, quantify and check all and any updating work.