Intelsat are the foundational architects of satellite technology, operating the world’s most trusted satellite telecom network. They acquired Gogo’s commercial aviation business in 2020, the largest global provider of in-flight broadband connectivity. With the acquisition of Gogo, Intelsat became the world’s leading inflight internet provider for the commercial aviation industry but their publishing process was time and labor intensive.

The creation and distribution of the technical publications was disparate with considerable manual input of content from historic PDF’s and no automated way of reusing content or creating custom manuals.

The solution – Structured S1000D authoring and intelligent content management

After analysis of Intelsat’s current publishing environment and immediate and future digital transformation requirements, we worked with the team to determine a multiphase approach to migrate to S1000D and implement an intelligent content management system.

We implemented the S1000D for PTC Windchill solution to support the creation, management, and delivery of Intelsat’s technical documentation.  Our team provided training and mentoring to support S1000D adoption, including Operational Readiness and Technical Support to enable Intelsat organic Tier 1 support capabilities.  As part of the migration to S1000D our team managed the conversion of over 16,000 pages of legacy FrameMaker pages to S1000D-compliant XML data modules.

In the six months since the implementation of the new S1000D publishing solution and migration of legacy documents into S1000D XML, the technical publications team have reported a 30% reduction in year over year cost to revise aircraft data sets.  The modernised toolset positions Intelsat to scale exponentially through the increased optimisation of digital thread capabilities.