GUNTER ANNEX, Ala. -- One of Business and Enterprise Systems Product Innovation’s (BESPIN’s) newest application teams is settled in and making progress toward improving access to Technical Orders (TOs) for the Air Force’s aircraft technicians. The Enhanced Technical Information Management System (ETIMS) team is working to create an application that will serve as a database for electronic TOs for all aircrafts.
The ETIMS team joined the BESPIN ecosystem through our Bring Your Own App Team option that enables customers to bring their own teams aboard to utilize BESPIN’s resources, such as our security team, continuous Authority to Operate (cATO), continuous integration, and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.
The ETIMS team has taken on the task of digitizing TOs and making them available to Airmen via iPads. TOs, provide step-by-step instructions that airmen must follow when performing maintenance on an aircraft. Many TOs are housed in printed manuals that can be thousands of pages long and the ETIMS team had roughly 40 manuals to digitize.
Capt. Arthur Rose, BESPIN’s Mobile Solutions Service Manager, said the team has already digitized 95 percent of TOs for all aircrafts and has partnered with KIRA to integrate Windows systems to iOS. This will allow airmen to access the digitized TOs on iPads, which most units now have.
“Digitizing these orders will make work a lot easier and more efficient for aircraft technicians,” Rose said. “It will be easier for technicians to find specific info, to keep the orders up-to-date, and to display information. The completion of this project will be a huge step in modernizing the Air Force.”
The team plans to tailor the application to meet the needs of airmen. For example, implementing a user interface that works well when wearing gloves.
With the needs of Airmen in mind, the mission of the ETIMS team is to provide user-friendly, technically accurate, and up-to-date digital technical data at the point of use that is acquired, sustained, distributed, and available in a digital format from a single point of access for all technical data users.
The ETIMS application is projected to enter production on CloudOne in the fall of 2022. We appreciate the opportunity to be a part of a project that will help make the jobs of Airmen easier and more efficient.