Guide™ is an innovative knowledge management system designed to improve maintenance life cycles. The uniqueness of Guide comes from its ability to combine technical documentation and work assignments into a highly interactive maintenance application.

Interactive documentation allows organizations to :

• Control how maintainers read and execute technical instructions

• Track and monitor real time progress of maintenance

• Accurately predict work completion time

• Improve rookie and novice performance

• Greatly enhance maintenance quality and reliability

Guide walks maintainers through complex technical documents while constantly evaluating work progress and predicting its completion time. Managers and supervisors gain real time progress indications, reports and smart time estimations enabling them to plan better and optimize the workforce.

Maintenance teams using Guide Mobile devices have access to critical information such as work assignments, task cards, deficiency reports, personal notes and accumulated knowledge - all without leaving their point of service or interfering with their work.

The Information Gap

The Guide system covers a common maintenance gap where:

• Electronic technical documents and work assignments are not available where they are meant to be used - at the point of service

• Supervisors lack real-time view of maintenance operations

These limitations require maintenance personnel to constantly walk back and forth to data terminals and documentation libraries - wasting valuable time. Supervisors have to constantly "walk the floor" to stay up to date with their teams' work.

The Guide solution

Guide optimizes this process by combining task and work instructions and sending them to the maintainers' hands - at the point of service. It provides automatic detailed tracking of all maintenance activities, making them available for supervisors review.

The following illustration displays the complexity of handling information coming from various sources, managing it, sending it to the point of maintenance and then collecting the resulting tracked logs for review by supervisors or ERP operators.

Work Assignments

Tasks can be assigned to maintenance personnel either by integrating with existing Maintenance Management or ERP Systems, or by using Guide's internal dispatch module. In any case, maintainers using the Guide Mobile device constantly receive notifications of new or updated work. Submitted tasks can be automatically mapped to a relevant set of technical documents to be displayed for the maintainers when they starts working.

Technical Documentation at the Point of Service

Guide enables importing of standard SGML content. In addition, it handles automatic distribution and tracking of content versions used in any of the organization's maintenance sites.

For maintainers, Guide provides the ability to access up-to-date technical documentation at the point of service. Technical documentation is presented as a break down check list, controlling how maintainers read and perform instructions. Users are required to check-off instructions as they finish performing them.

Live Task Progress Monitoring

Maintainers' work is logged and transmitted to the server, either by wireless networking or hard wire. Tracked data is constantly fed to the system's servers and allow prediction of highly accurate completion times and progress estimations. Detailed work reports can also be generated using the system's analytic reporting engine.

Deficiency Reports (Squawks)

The ability to report findings and deficiencies detected during maintenance inspection is critical to successful and reliable maintenance operation. Guide enables maintainers to open and review such reports while in the field – saving valuable time and increasing probability of such reports actually getting filed and processed in time.