A global energy technology leader provides products, systems and services across power generation, energy transmission, renewable energy and industrial decarbonization. Its portfolio includes mission-critical equipment and distributed control systems used to operate and monitor complex energy infrastructure. One of its control platforms supports more than 4,000 installations globally across power generation, battery storage, solar energy, wind energy and substation automation.
Accurate, accessible and current documentation is essential in an environment like this. Yet the client’s documentation platform had been introduced nearly 15 years earlier and had become increasingly difficult and expensive to maintain. Knowledge of the original customizations had been lost, the vendor was no longer willing to support or enhance the version in use and moving to the vendor’s newer platform would have required significant additional investment.
The legacy environment created mounting operational and business constraints:
- Slow documentation builds: The largest manuals took approximately seven hours to build
- Manual publishing effort: Multiple publishing steps required significant engineering intervention
- Release-cycle misalignment: Documentation frequently lagged agile product releases
- Outdated user experience: The interface no longer reflected the quality of the client’s modern technology portfolio
- Restricted collaboration: Proprietary XML structures and custom tags limited access to specialist technical writers, while product owners, developers and testers could not easily review content before publication
- Unsupported defects: Several unresolved issues remained because the platform was no longer fully supported
- Limited search: Compatibility issues with modern browsers constrained search functionality
- No practical AI path: The closed architecture made AI integration impractical
- High operating cost: Annual platform licensing was approximately €35,000, while the environment required eight dedicated servers
Documentation had become more than a publishing issue. It was affecting the client’s ability to release complete product updates on schedule.
The client therefore needed a full documentation-lifecycle transformation without interrupting ongoing releases or losing updates being made during the transition.
Rebuilding the Documentation Lifecycle Around Open Standards
Persistent designed and implemented a modern, fully automated and scalable documentation platform using open-source technologies.
The new documentation-as-code architecture combined AsciiDoc for creating and maintaining technical content, Git for version control and collaborative review, automated CI/CD pipelines for documentation generation and Antora for publishing HTML and PDF outputs. The resulting open architecture also created a foundation for future AI-enabled documentation workflows.
Persistent extracted the existing XML-based content, converted it into AsciiDoc and transferred the documentation repository to Git. The migration covered six languages and continued while technical writers were still updating source documentation. To avoid losing live changes, Persistent established a parallel migration process that preserved real-time updates throughout the transition.
The Linux Foundation’s State of Global Open Source 2025 found that open source already supports mission-critical infrastructure, with 40–55% adoption across AI, DevOps, databases and operating systems. The same research found that 83% of respondents consider open source valuable to their organization’s future.
For the client, the shift to an open architecture reduced dependency while making documentation easier to evolve.
Automating Publishing Without Breaking the User Experience
Persistent automated processes that had previously required manual intervention, including equipment catalogue updates, contextual help mappings, multilingual HTML and PDF generation and documentation builds through CI/CD pipelines.
Contextual help required particular care. Users needed to continue accessing relevant documentation directly from within the control platform. Persistent retained that capability while automating the underlying mapping process.
The documentation interface was also redesigned in line with the client’s brand and user-experience guidelines. Product owners, developers, testers and technical writers could now access and review documentation directly through Git, increasing transparency and allowing feedback to be incorporated earlier in the lifecycle.
McKinsey research on AI-enabled software product development argues that the strongest gains come when AI is integrated across the end-to-end product lifecycle rather than isolated to individual tasks. It also notes that AI can shift teams toward higher-value work by reducing repetitive activity.
The significance here was straightforward: the previous architecture had made AI integration impractical. The new platform removed that constraint.
Business Impact
From Seven-Hour Builds to an AI-Ready Documentation Platform
- 50% faster time to market through documentation delivery aligned more closely with agile product releases
- 40% reduction in overall documentation costs through removal of proprietary licensing, lower infrastructure requirements and reduced engineering effort
- 90% reduction in documentation build time, with the largest manuals falling from approximately seven hours to around 30 minutes
- Approximately €35,000 in annual licensing costs eliminated
- Eight servers decommissioned
- Six-language migration completed while preserving ongoing content updates and uninterrupted business delivery
- Improved cross-functional collaboration through direct Git-based access for product owners, developers, testers and technical writers
- Modernized user experience aligned with the client’s brand and experience standards
- Reduced vendor dependency through an in-house documentation solution that can be customized and enhanced
- Foundation created for future AI-enabled documentation workflows
The client gained more than faster documentation generation. It gained a more transparent, collaborative and adaptable environment capable of keeping pace with product delivery.
Turning Documentation into a Reusable Modernization Model
Persistent brought deep product and domain knowledge to the engagement through a long-standing strategic relationship. More than 100 Persistent professionals were already supporting the broader product ecosystem, giving the team strong end-to-end knowledge across the client’s product, engineering environment and documentation processes.
Rather than waiting for a formal modernization request, Persistent identified the documentation environment as an opportunity for improvement and developed a working proof of concept through internal innovation initiatives. That proof demonstrated how open-source technologies, automation and AI readiness could address a challenge that had remained unresolved for several years.
The resulting architecture is scalable and reusable across other documentation environments and the client is exploring opportunities to extend the approach across additional business units.
Persistent transformed the infrastructure, content format, publishing process, collaboration model and user experience while maintaining uninterrupted business delivery.
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