Margit Olbrich, IT Use, Diagnosis, and Predictive Maintenance, DB Systemtechnik GmbH
The Deutsche Bahn group transports more than 12 million people on a daily basis on passenger transport across Europe. This outstanding achievement in terms of logistics would be unimaginable without a sophisticated maintenance and servicing management system.
Some of the challenges that the transport company faces are the growing number of trains and models, increasing time and cost pressure as well as strict legal regulations regarding the transparency and traceability of maintenance documents.
Deutsche Bahn creates and manages its maintenance documentation in the form of work instructions and maintenance manuals. In order to ensure that operations run smoothly, the group must provide these to the maintenance facilities at any time in the most up-to-date version. In addition, the complete creation process must be verifiable without any gaps.
For the railway vehicles of DB Fernverkehr AG and DB Regio AG, this complex process took place in a historically accumulated IT system on the basis of an SAP database. However, the heterogeneous system landscape became less and less suitable for the needs of the several hundred users due to the increasing technical and specialist requirements. Amendments, maintenance and technical operation were also no longer practical for economic reasons.
In 2012, Deutsche Bahn realized that they needed to embrace digitalization to be able to meet all of the requirements for maintenance and servicing in an economically reasonable manner.
In a Europe-wide call to tender, they looked for a maintenance system which could be used in the long term and which not only supported their creating and administration processes, but also significantly sped them up through digitalized and dynamic workflows. At the end of the call for tender, in which many well-known providers participated, Deutsche Bahn chose inxire Digital Maintenance.
The innovative digital platform has thus prevailed against international competition and has supported the transport company since then in the creation of rules and standards for the maintenance of vehicles.
The intelligent and flexible review and publication mechanism in inxire Digital Maintenance ensures that all those involved can develop their documents in a traceable, uniformly structured and compliant manner. The preparation and publication is carried out specifically to each target group and in various media formats such as XML, PDF, Microsoft Word or Web.
inxire Digital Maintenance uses the internationally relevant standards. It unites the flexibility of DITA with the structured and tried-and-tested concepts of DocBook, supports S1000D™, as well as all of the processes in Entity in Charge of Maintenance (ECM).
Parallel review processes, reusable documentation building blocks and the use of control data such as maintenance levels, types of construction or model ranges all guarantee significant savings in terms of time and costs along the entire formation and implementation process and beyond.
DB Regio AG, DB Fernverkehr AG
“For us authors, inxire Digital Maintenance means an enormous reduction in workload. We can create the documents significantly faster and more easily than before, and the release processes have also become a lot shorter. All of the necessary data is compiled from different sources in inxire. So we can be sure that everything is always up-to-date.”
The digitalization of Deutsche Bahn permeates all areas of their business today. inxire Digital Maintenance has contributed significantly to this. The software has clearly improved the maintenance and servicing management of DB Fernverkehr and DB Regio.
Amongst others, the company has benefited from a significant reduction and optimization of the effort required to create rules and standards. The system is also being implemented in other areas of the group, such as DB Cargo. With inxire Digital Maintenance, Deutsche Bahn now has a platform which will join the company on its journey into the digital future.
Margit Olbrich
IT Use, Diagnosis, and Predictive Maintenance,
DB Systemtechnik GmbH
“The topic of digitalization is very important to Deutsche Bahn. The inxire Digital Maintenance platform is an important component in this, which not only pushes us forward economically, but also with regard to the satisfaction of our clients.”
Kerstin Rösner
Methodological contact person for the instruction management,
HypoVereinsbank
“Working with inxire, we have adapted our instruction management to the new digitalized world. Today, we offer our employees interactive features which they recognize from social networks, self-learning search functions and a dynamic workflow, which is based on their user profile.”
Frank Closheim
Head of Product Management,
inxire GmbH
“Volkswagen uses inxire Digital Content in telematics as the central data hub with interfaces for several systems.”
Dave Long
Chief Architect,
inxire GmbH
“Numerous customers successfully use the inxire Digital Platform for business-related applications. An excellent example is the National Ignition Facility, a leading American institute which generates and processes huge amounts of data during nuclear research. As this would overload most systems, the scientists use the inxire Digital Platform, which is specially designed for the management and evaluation of very large data volumes.”
Angelika Schön
Producer,
arsEdition GmbH
“Thanks to inxire, documents can be created automatically and images and text can be located quicker - we benefit from this as much during production as during the editing process. And time-consuming manual searching has stopped completely.”
Benjamin Brändle
Technical project manager,
application service development AG
“Only with the combination of an Oracle database and inxire was it possible to achieve maximum compatibility between the different data suppliers and realize the highest level of functionality at the same time.”
Ulrich Beerhorst
Managing Director,
BEIT Systemhaus GmbH
“Using a solution by inxire, we can now ensure that customers and the sales forces are always supplied with up-to-date information.”
Herbert Kronlechner
Director of the Office of Information and Organization,
City of Innsbruck
"inxire has supplied us with a first-class editing system and provided optimum consultation. In this manner, they have proven to be the ideal partner for us for redesigning the city portal and preparing the way for eGovernment."
Uwe Deller
Director of Communications,
General Motors European Development
"As a central knowledge pool, our new platform offers us the possibility of tracking down all requested information in a quick and secure manner. With the solution inxire, which was tailored to meet our specifications, we are able to work very efficiently, pan-departmentally and across international borders."
Frank Closheim
Head of Product Management,
inxire GmbH
“With the introduction of the inxire basic technology as a knowledge management system, the French telecommunications provider acquired a central repository for documents critical to business.”
Gerd Armbruster
Head of Division of Information Technology,
City of Mannheim
"With this solution, the individual departments can now create and update their own Internet contents without knowledge of HTML."
Frank Closheim
Head of Product Management,
inxire GmbH
“Netcall uses several components of inxire Digital for its document and customer relationship management solutions, which many customers in Great Britain use.”
Frank Closheim
Head of Product Management,
inxire GmbH
“On the basis of the inxire Digital Platform, C.H.Beck has developed its own text/image archive and has been using it successfully for several years.”
Toni Schnell
Managing Director,
inxire GmbH
“With the introduction of inxire Digital Content, processes were optimized and automated globally in order to find relevant information quickly and securely.”
Frank Closheim
Head of Product Management,
inxire GmbH
“The University of Cambridge uses components of inxire Digital for their organization-wide document management.”
Birgit Schüssler
Head of Quality Management & Projects
inxire GmbH
“The introduction of inxire Digital Compliance has led to long-term savings in operating costs for the maintenance and use of the IFRS Accounting manual. The easy-to-use and high-performing software makes the workload much lighter for editors and users of the manual.”
Frank Closheim
Head of Product Management,
inxire GmbH
“The British provider for financial advice and services uses inxire Digital Platform as the basis for complaints management and archiving.”
Christian Hahn
Project manager,
TÜV Austria
“With functions such as full text search, keyword assignment, classification and complete document life cycles, we can now really make optimal use of the potential of our data pool.”
Oliver Sauter
Head of IT,
Tropa Holding Limited
“The use of inxire Digital Content means an enormous time saving. It allows the employees to access all of the important documents quickly and securely. They can concentrate their full, undivided attention on their work and focus their resources on the development of the business.”
Toni Schnell
Managing Director,
inxire GmbH
“inxire supports the German Federal Armed Forces in the digitalization of their information systems. As a registry of regulations in management information systems or Digital Publishing in the commando cyber and information space, several inxire product components are being used successfully.”