BAE Systems Regional Aircraft Selects WebX for Tech Pubs and Portal Delivery

BAE Systems Regional Aircraft has selected WebX Systems of Redhill, Surrey, UK to deliver a new long-term Technical Publications and Publishing System for the support of its regional airliner products for a minimum of the next ten years.

The new system, Ultra CSDB, will replace several legacy systems currently in use with a single fully-integrated solution, from content generation through to an online PDF delivery using the WebX UltraPortal offering.

Access to the new service will continue to be through the Regional Aircraft portal (www.regional-services.com).

The total project cost, including the system purchase together with internal manhours at Regional Aircraft’s Prestwick, Scotland, facility to deliver data transfer from the legacy systems, and IT support amounts to about £750,000 or about $ 1,126,000.

“This is a major statement of our ongoing commitment to the long-term support of our products”, said Sean McGovern, managing director of BAE Systems Regional Aircraft.

“This sizable investment ensures that the business will be at the forefront of delivering good quality technical data which can be easily accessed in a timely manner.

“It will give our customers the ability to download publications on-line and will meet their expectations for a PDF delivery compatible with many industry-standard electronic flight bags.”

Project work started at Prestwick in early November and will take some 18 months to complete. In total approximately 3000 manuals have to be transferred along with details for the 2,500 users of the current iSAPPHIRE system. The transition from the legacy systems to the new WebX system will be done by aircraft type, starting with the 29-seat Jetstream 41 turboprop airliner.

The first phase will be a proof of concept to ensure that data migration from a selection of Jetstream 41 manuals to the new system have been successfully transferred. Customers will be invited to take part in a testing stage before the system is fully released for use. For several months both legacy systems and the new system will operate side by side to ensure continuity of service.

The Advanced Turboprop ATP airliner/freighter will follow and then succeeded by the older BAe 748 turboprop airliner. Next will be the 18/19 seat Jetstream 31/32 turboprops, with the final phase being the BAe 146/Avro RJ regional jets for completion by mid-2017.

Andy McAdam, Technical Publications & Maintenance Services Manager added: We have been working on this new project for some time along with our colleagues from BAE Systems Military Air and Information where the WebX system has been operational since the summer and performing very well.

“The previous legacy systems we operate are different as they were inherited from previous manufacturing sites, and these have become superseded over time with support for these platforms now being difficult.

“Importantly, the new WebX system means we can narrow the skill sets we need to operate the new offering, making us more efficient and delivering manual revisions quicker than we currently do. Essentially, we are changing the way we work from generating content through to customer delivery.”

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