Brainstorming ideas

["Goldstein Steven (STNA-IN/PRM1)" <Steven -dot- Goldstein -at- us -dot- bosch -dot- com>]

Hello,

First, an explanation of who my customers are:

My company manufactures products that are sold internationally and
installed through a dealer network. These dealers have technicians on
staff that are responsible for installing and maintaining my company's
products. Therefore, my customers are the dealers and technicians, not
the end-users who own my company's products. In fact, my company's
Technical Support department only takes calls from dealers/technicians.
If an end-user calls my Tech Support for assistance, he is told to call
his dealer. There are approximately 1,500 dealers worldwide who service
my company's products.



Now, an explanation of the need:

Quite simply, the need is to reduce calls coming into Tech Support, and
to reduce the duration of the calls that do come into Tech Support.



The challenge:

My boss has challenged me to develop a plan that will address the need
mentioned above (this is what I get for being the new kid on the block
with fresh ideas!). My first step in accomplishing this is to improve
how we document our troubleshooting procedures. I will be teaching my
technical writing peers how to document an analytical troubleshooting
approach that will get the technicians to the root cause of the problem
more quickly, with less confusion. This will result in fewer calls to
Tech Support. Also, Tech Support will use these new troubleshooting
procedures to handle calls that do come in, which will help them reduce
the duration of the call.

My boss loves this idea, and I have his full support. But he doesn't
want me to stop there! My customers (the technicians) don't have
Internet access when they're on the road, so he wants me to do something
like provide all of our product literature (mostly PDF format, and
there's a lot of it) on CD-ROM, with an easily navigable user interface
so that the technicians can find the documentation they're looking for
easily.

Here's where the brainstorming comes in. I could create an online help
project, which would provide the navigation system that allows the
technicians to easily find the product documentation they need (I
currently author help using RoboHelp X5). But this documentation is
constantly being updated, and new documentation is constantly being
added to the collection. So I'm wondering if a RoboHelp Airplane Help
solution might be useful--if the technician has Internet access, he'll
pull the latest info off of the web; otherwise, he'll pull the info off
of the CD-ROM. Does Airplane Help only work with WebHelp Pro output, or
can it also update topics embedded in an HTML Help project if the user
is connected to the Internet?

Another idea I have is to use an automatic updating feature, like many
software products use to keep customers' installed software at the
latest rev. I've done a small amount of research, and see that
InstallShield has an Update Service product that can do this. Is this a
viable way that I can keep the technicians' documentation, which they
would "install" from the CD-ROM, up-to-date on their PCs (assuming that
they connect to the Internet periodically)? If this is possible, then I
might only have to send 1,500 CD-ROMs to the technicians once (to
install the first release of the documentation, plus to install the
auto-update software). But I wouldn't have to later send them updates on
CD-ROM--once they get the first version installed, their documentation
will update automatically.

What do you think? Does this plan have potential? What caveats haven't I
thought of? Is there a better approach?

Thanks for your ideas,

Steve

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