In September 1995 Rolls-Royce and Bentley Motor Cars Ltd decided to develop a completely integrated system for the creation, management, publication and display of Service and Parts technical information. This was named IETIS (Integrated Electronic Technical Information System).

IETIS used integrated SGML-Authoring, SGML-Management and Database technologies to replace desktop publishing and post-processing for electronic display. The post processing resource and CD viewer were supplied to Rolls-Royce and Bentley Motor Cars by a third party supplier. This process was first used in June 1995.

The main reasons for moving to electronic display was to reduce the cost of publication (print costs) and to provide a better process for updating information (replacing the CD instead of sending individual amendment sheets).

The primary reason for the introduction of IETIS was to reduce the cost of producing technical information.

This objective was achieved by:

• 1. Creating information which could be automatically compiled and displayed without additional processing costs.
• 2. Creating user-friendly authoring tools, this enables a single author to efficiently create the complete rage of technical information for a feature.
• 3. Enabling automatic input of the language translations as variants of the source language.
• 4. Making the reuse of information an easier process for the authors e.g. import information instead of re-keying.
• 5. Providing management information relating to the work status

The IETIS System was designed to cover management of all types of technical publications (including non-SGML) such as: Workshop Manuals, Parts-Catalogues, Wiring-Diagrams, Technical Bulletins, Man-Hour-Schedules (Service/Labour-Times) etc.. in a single, consistent, object-oriented environment based on Object-Management-Engine (OME) supporting among other features, hierarchical tree-structures, hyperlinks, versioning, multilingual-variants as well as Rolls-Royce Motor Cars specific PIN classification (Part Index Number) and VIN (Vehicle Identification Number).

IETIS has been also designed to meet the requirements of SAE J2008 (Automotive-exchange standard).

The IETIS CD-Viewer is capable of running on Windows 3.11, Windows-95/98, Windows-NT 4.x. Also it has been integrated into the Rolls-Royce & Bentley Diagnostics system to enable a technician to view both Service and Diagnostics information on the same machine.

Management Information - describing: the above introduction, plus the measurable financial and quality benefits, the overall Architecture of the IETIS-System, some examples of user-friendliness of IETIS-Tools, experiences of 2-years of practical, productive exploitation and maintenance

Technical Information - describing: some basics of implementation including the OME Architecture, Versioning, support of Language-Variants and Language-Translations, reuse/sharing of Information, some details of the integration of SGML-Editor, OCR-Engine,...

Some background will be given why certain tools and technical implementation-decisions have been taken (ex ArborText as SGML-Editor, ORACLE as Database...).