Accelerating document production and ROI

Headquartered in Canada, this large defense systems integrator specializes in providing technology-based electronic systems, systems integration and in-service support, with the capacity to take on multiyear projects of strategic national significance.

Managing the project requirements for many critical defense and public security agencies around the globe is a formidable challenge—the contracts are huge, the audits are frequent and the margin for error is zero. Pursuing excellence in the production of highly complex, technology-based, integrated solutions for land, airborne and maritime applications demands the highest degree of efficiency possible from the company’s development, test and manufacturing environments.

In preparation for taking on a large engagement with a complex requirements process, the company turned its attention to the slow, manual process of exporting Microsoft Word documents that provide critical updates to partners and customers throughout the product development process. “Generating 100 test-plan or test-case documents for external review could take weeks or even months—and on top of that, the lack of format control led to further manual effort for the publication team just to make the results look user-friendly,” says the company’s contact for database support services.

The company decided to select Rational Publishing Engine (RPE) software to automate the process and funnel development specifications into preselected document templates. “At the push of a button, RPE was able to generate our highly complex reports flawlessly in a fraction of the time,” the contact says. “Now the thousands of documents that go out to partners and customers each year are both easy to read and easy to create, which was previously unimaginable.”

Delivering integration
Recently, the company successfully created a project by integrating Rational Publishing Engine with its existing IBM Rational DOORS software. In a move that illustrates the simplicity of IBM Rational solutions, it was possible to program the integration of RPE with DOORS entirely in-house in just two days. “Working with RPE, I quickly realized I could write an interface between the two products to queue up every single module within the DOORS database,” says the contact. “We tried out a few alternatives, but only RPE could deliver the trifecta of high-speed performance, control over document styles and the ability to export data from multiple DOORS source modules automatically.”

The flexibility to work with different data modules is not just nice to have, but a necessity—especially given the reporting requirements of taking on major programs. The customer delivery commitment involves producing hundreds of custom reports that summarize requirements documents, test procedures, analysis results, trace matrices and compliance documents, all in different formats and from different sources. By running RPE against the disparate data modules to unify and format the output, weeks of lead time for report generation are no longer needed.

Standardizing the output
The company used RPE to establish a standardized export format, allowing the database support services department to automatically control how the output document will look. “Controlling the output is one of the key features of RPE, as it offers many customization options for template creation,” says the contact. “By using macros from our Publication Group, we can specify mixed styles, variable content and various page configurations and have RPE start publishing automatically.”

In addition to simplifying the output process, RPE also transformed the process of exporting higher volumes of requirements data from several DOORS databases and modules. “In high-demand situations, we can use RPE to schedule and run one data module after another for document generation, or even export a whole database in just three hours,” says the contact.

Transforming requirements management
Despite the complexity of requirements for the projects the company takes on, adding RPE to the mix was surprisingly easy. “I just read the RPE user manual and was up and running on my own,” says the contact. “There was no training or long learning curve needed, and I just rolled it out to our Publications Group—we were able to recently produce 11,000 pages in seven days to meet an important customer deliverable.”

Productivity gains realized through the automation of document publishing also free staff to concentrate on Request for Proposal (RFP) milestones and other priorities. “The speed of document generation allows us to focus on improving our organizational efficiency and processes,” says the contact. “RPE took a lot of the pressure off of our Publications Group and has balanced out the work on large programs that require close collaboration between teams.”

Collaboration is a term that applies well to the environment at the company, where the deployment of IBM Rational software has unified disparate teams while working together on large contracts. “Because we’re using DOORS for requirements, we can trace any issue back to the source—that links up well with the issue-reporting feature of ClearQuest,” says the contact. “At the same time, ClearQuest is helping us realize a reduction in costs by minimizing errors and defects—and when you’re talking about huge projects like building a helicopter integrated mission system, those savings become exponential.”

Delivering ROI in minutes
With Rational Publishing Engine, the need for months of lead time for generating in-house documents is already a distant memory. “When I was evaluating the software, I gave it one large data module to output and turn into a document—and in 3.5 minutes it was done. It was so fast that I thought it must have been a mistake, but it wasn’t,” says the contact. “RPE delivers astounding return on investment (ROI) by enabling us to now export over 100 precisely formatted documents in just under eight hours.”

For this busy defense systems integrator, IBM Rational software has had a transformative effect on business processes. “We needed more flexibility and a way to accelerate our processes, and Rational helped us accomplish that more quickly than we could have imagined,” the contact concludes. “With IBM Rational in place, our organization is locked and loaded for success.”