McDonnell Douglas's commercial aircraft manufacturing division, Douglas Aircraft, is using Netscape and the World Wide Web to build a system to distribute aircraft service bulletins to their customers around the world.

This new document distribution system provides several benefits. It is:

• less expensive - electronic distribution is less than half the cost of mailing paper.
• faster - customers receive service bulletins immediately (versus two to three weeks in the case of international customers).
• more flexible - customers can integrate the SGML files into their own documents.

• easy to use
• a leading browser in the marketplace
• backed by a company with great expertise

Providing customers with up-to-date product information is a challenge for any company. When the customers are all over the world and the products are as complex as modern aircraft, the challenge can be immense. McDonnell Douglas faces - and solves - this challenge every business day, using Netscape technology and the World Wide Web.

Based in Long Beach, California, the 11,000-person Douglas Aircraft Company, a division of McDonnell Douglas Corporation, builds airplanes for over 200 airlines around the world. In addition to delivering airplanes, it delivers a staggering volume of aircraft service bulletins - documents that provide crucial information on how to modify and service the company's airplanes.

"The average bulletin is 25 pages long," says Brad Foreman, general manager of Maintenance and Modifications Engineering. "We distribute four to five each day to customers around the world." This accounts for over 4 million pages of documentation every year. It would take a small forest of trees to produce that much paper.

But that small forest can breathe easier, now that McDonnell Douglas has begun to tap into the power of the World Wide Web, using Netscape Navigator and Netscape Commerce Server software, to distribute service bulletins in a new way - electronically.

NETSCAPE AND THE WEB FOR WORLDWIDE DISTRIBUTION

"We have customers and suppliers all over the world," says Pauline Nornholm, Douglas Aircraft's general manager of IS. "We wanted to eliminate processing paper. So we asked ourselves, what is the best platform for deploying information to our customers and suppliers worldwide? We decided that it was the World Wide Web. It's there now, people understand it, and you can access it from anywhere in the world."

Foreman adds, "We didn't want to lock our customers into a proprietary system. We wanted to have something that took advantage of off-the-shelf software and industry standards. The only thing that fit that bill was the World Wide Web."

The company evaluated several Web browsers and ultimately chose Netscape Navigator. "The choice was an easy one, given Netscape's background and expertise, combined with the fact that Netscape has about 85 percent of the market for browsers. Plus, Navigator is a solid product and easy to use," says Foreman.

SECURITY FOR PROPRIETARY INFORMATION

McDonnell Douglas had already set up a Web page to provide general information about the company and its products to all visitors. This was an ideal place to provide customers with access to service bulletins. But service bulletins often contain proprietary information.

"So, immediately the issue of security came up. If you just put information on the Internet, it's pretty much public domain; anyone can access it, unless you do something to secure it," says Nornholm. "We chose the Netscape Commerce Server because it provides us a way to encrypt our data using RSA encryption, which is a standard we want to follow."

To view or download service bulletins, customers simply call up McDonnell Douglas's home page and choose a button labeled "Access Service Bulletins." They then are required to enter their unique password. Foreman continues, "We take security precautions to make the service bulletins' area private. One of the reasons we were attracted to Netscape was its security features."

Douglas Aircraft runs Netscape's Commerce Server on a Hewlett-Packard HP 9000 Model 800 E Unix server. The service bulletins are stored as SGML files in an Oracle 7.1 database, which is accessed by the Web page.

BENEFITS OF ELECTRONIC DISTRIBUTION

Foreman saw three problems with their existing paper-based system for distributing service bulletins. First, paper takes time - often too much time - to travel from the copy room to the customer's desk. "Up to 65 percent of our customers are international. When we mail service bulletins to them, they can take two to three weeks to arrive. The technical information in the bulletin is crucial - so every missed week counts," he says.

"And since the information is online, it's real-time," continues Nornholm. "This improves the quality of the data."

Second, once the paper actually gets to the customer, it's no longer "live" data that customers can incorporate into their own systems. "Now we give the customer service bulletins in SGML (a superset of the HTML standard), and they can cut and paste the information into their own documents. It cuts down work on their end," says Foreman.

Third, paper is hard to store and retrieve. "After 20 years, you end up with a building full of documents. Now we can store them all digitally and access them via the Web," he says. Both McDonnell Douglas's customers and employees can access service bulletins right from their desktops.

Benefits of distributing service bulletins via the Web are already apparent. "We're expecting dramatic reduction in paper distribution, which costs money," says Nornholm. Foreman estimates that documents distributed in digital form over the Internet cost less than half what paper-based documents cost.

PLANS FOR THE FUTURE

The company is evaluating whether to put maintenance manuals on the Web. "The volume of these documents is tremendous. A set of manuals for an aircraft runs 45,000 to 50,000 pages. Most of the airlines still use paper or magnetic tape," says Foreman. Experiments are also underway to use Pentium-based computers on jets so pilots and maintenance crews can access the Web directly.

Nornholm points out several ways the Web could be used to streamline other internal operations. "Eventually, we'll probably share manufacturing, financial, and engineering data on the Internet across different parts of our company," she says. "Ultimately we want to use the Internet for any information that has to be transferred from one country to another, or one city to another, or one building to another."

"One of the amazing things about the World Wide Web is that it is truly worldwide," says Foreman. "Sardinia is a small island across the coast from Italy. We have a customer there who wants to get our documents via the Web. We don't have to convince them this is the way things are going - they're asking for it."

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