SunExpress

Reducing conversion costs by enabling subject matter experts and reviewers to create XML content.

Context

SunExpress both creates content and curates content from manufacturers like Boeing and Airbus.

Since its founding in 1989 as a joint venture between Lufthansa and Turkish Airlines, SunExpress has developed its position as a leisure airline within Europe and is now also one of the largest airlines operating between Germany and Turkey. The airline carries nearly ten million passengers every year. 

SunExpress both creates content (procedures and manuals) and curates content from manufacturers like Boeing and Airbus. In total SunExpress manages around 500 procedures (50 – 60 pages each) and 90 manuals (hundreds of pages per manual).

Challenge

Single-source publishing with different output formats, while reducing conversion cost.

Most of the content (e.g. safety and operational procedures) is written by subject matter experts across different SunExpress departments. ‘Compliance Monitoring Management’ for example is often involved in reviewing the content while ‘Documentation Management’ is responsible for publishing.

SunExpress has been using Adobe FrameMaker since 2008 and switched from an internal XML schema to DITA in 2012. All procedures and around 30% of the manuals are stored as DITA. Microsoft SharePoint is used to store the DITA content and to enable versioning and approval workflows.

A small and well defined subset of DITA is used. For compliance and consistency reasons the DITA content referencing mechanism is used to include common topics, organization charts, job titles and other officially defined names.

In 2016 SunExpress started using Fonto in order to achieve two main goals:

  1. Single-source publishing with different output formats: HTML, PDF, Electronic Flight Bag devices.
  2. Reduce conversion cost: allow subject matter experts and reviewers to create XML content.

Solution

Fonto Editor integrated in Microsoft SharePoint

Today, Fonto Editor is integrated into the existing SharePoint environment, since the introduction of the existing Word-based process and the new XML-first process co-exist. SunExpress chose wisely to slowly onboard subject matter experts to Fonto.

New users are trained by the Documentation Management staff to use Fonto. The biggest challenge during the training of the new users appeared to be the (DITA) concept of maps and topics. This concept is new to writers since it doesn’t exist in other authoring tools like Word.

By now, over 100 subject matter experts create XML content with Fonto. Those who use Fonto are happy doing so and state that:

“Fonto is actually easier than Microsoft Word”

Takeaways

  • Seamless integration with SharePoint
  • Reducing costs by allowing subject matter experts and reviewers to create XML content
  • Single-source publishing with different output formats, i.e. HTML, PDF, and Electronic Flight Bag devices
  • Use of the DITA standard

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