Rationale
BAE Systems Hägglunds, who's major role in industry is as a supplier of defence material, was very early to adopt international standards and technologies on the fore-front. With their in-house developed product data management system, there was a desire to extend its functionality to include support for the production of customer documentation. BAE Systems Hägglunds anticipated future requirements from customers to produce more customer specific documentation - even unique for each individual. This would be very complex unless the production and maintenance of technical documentation (until now quite isolated from other functions) became more integrated with especially the engineering department.

At the same time, and even if BAE Systems Hägglunds had not faced any such requirements yet, the general trend was that customers required more and more deliverables (both product data and documentation) according to international standards.
 
Components
The project focused on the introduction of STEP and SGML (a predecessor to XML) concepts for tighter integration of information between engineering functions and product documentation functions within the enterprise. For the coexistence of mixed product information in an extended use of a product data management solution, SGML was applied in a manner that allows content-based definitions of fine-grain text information units. These were linked into the product definition structure (STEP), where the concept of a product representation was extended to include structured text representations. The seamless integration of work on technical documentation under control of a PDM system is demonstrated by the design and implementation of an authoring and publishing system, which is a client to a host based PDM system.

The infrastructure for that integration is based on the extended use of product data management capabilities for both functions and the utilisation of a CORBA based distributed computing environment.

Key components of the conceptual architecture are:
• Information model driven design
• Content-oriented structure of fine-grain document fragments
• Use of SGML for documents, based on FMV Grund-DTD
• Separation between authoring of information and publishing
• Linkage between information model (STEP) and documentation (SGML)
• Use of STEP for product data import and export
 
Results and benefits 
• Tighter integration between the design, logistics and publishing department
• Improved concurrent engineering
• Product changes are easily tracked into documentation
• Much simplified variant control of documentation, which can be made customer specific
• Documentation is a part of the everyday work for engineers, and available earlier.

In reference to Roger Ljung at BAE Systems Hägglunds, the benefits are summarised by the following quotation: "What we are developing for our in-house purposes will benefit our customers through new and cost effective services and offerings".

Since the LOTS project was concluded, BAE Systems Hägglunds have continued to develop their IT environment along the same lines. In recent years, Eurostep has helped them implementing export of documentation according to AECMA 1000D, as well as sharing project and product data with partners around Europe, using the Eurostep Share-A-space server solution.