US Marine Corps
Data access wherever you are
Allowing 24/7 access to online manuals, in the Gulf and around the world.
iOra provides United States Marine Corps (USMC) maintenance crews 24/7 uninterrupted access to online manuals in extremely challenging network environments around the world, ensuring continuity of operations.
Background
The task of keeping the vast amounts of equipment, including vehicles and weapons, in good working order falls to the USMC’s huge force of “maintainers”. These men and women work to ensure that all equipment when it is called upon is in a safe, reliable and fully operational state of repair. To perform this enormous and often complex task, the maintainers require access to all up-to-date maintenance manuals and records that accompany every piece of USMC equipment. The USMC also have a team of technical writers who are continuously publishing new and improved manuals that employ in-the-field learning, latest technology and improve maintenance performance.
The Challenge
The task of taking all maintenance documentation into the field had previously been carried out via a paper-based system. Maintainers physically carried foot lockers containing the required manuals and documents with the bulky paper documents updated via the military mail service. Because the USMC operate such a variety of equipment in so many different and challenging remote locations, this paper system was highly inefficient. To improve the information access and collaboration facilities available to their maintainers in the field, the USMC deployed Microsoft SharePoint. The maintainers now had access to a portal that stored all of the manuals and records they needed, via a laptop. Publishing of updated manuals was now instant, from the technician in the US, to all of the maintainers using the portal around the world. While SharePoint has dramatically improved the accuracy, availability and the maintenance documentation, it relies on a high bandwidth internet connection. Without a connection, the portal is inaccessible and, with the slow connections often found in the sorts of environments in which the USMC operate, the download times for large manuals are unfeasibly long often making it an impractical and inefficient solution.
The Geo-Replicator® Solution
To address this problem and to extend the portal to users with no or little network bandwidth, the USMC has deployed iOra’s Geo-Replicator software on its maintainer’s laptops. Geo-Replicator maintainers with a complete offline version of their Microsoft SharePoint maintenance portal and allows maintainers to search the portal’s many technical manuals during maintenance procedures without needing a satellite internet connection.
The Result
The USMC maintainers need to have access to tens of gigabytes of data 24/7 if they are to do their job effectively. Now, rather than carrying around huge foot lockers of manuals, the information is all stored on a laptop, within the Geo-Replicator the portal. This increases efficiency, effectiveness and performance whilst reducing costs and ensuring vital continuity of operations in challenging and demanding environments.
Geo-Replicator® Benefits
The virtual SharePoint site looks and operates exactly the same as if they were connected to a US-based SharePoint server via a T1 connection eliminating the need for additional investment in training. Instant access to critical SharePoint content offline in the most remote areas of the world ensures real-time publishing of up-to-date maintenance documentation across the globe.