Documents Required for IETM Development: A Complete Checklist for OEMs

You just won a defence contract. You open the SOTR (Statement of Technical Requirements) and see this line:

The OEM shall deliver Interactive Electronic Technical Manual (IETM) Level 4 compliant with JSG 0852:2019 along with the equipment.

You call an IETM vendor. They say: Great, just send us the inputs and we'll get started.

Then the real question hits:

What exactly are the inputs required for IETM development?

What documents does the vendor need, in what format and by when?

This is one of the most common questions we hear at Code and Pixels after 75+ IETM projects delivered to the Indian Army, Navy, Air Force, DRDO, BDL, BEL, ECIL, HSL, Many shipyards and drone manufacturer and private defense OEMs across India. Getting the right inputs to your vendor in the right format, is where IETM projects either run on schedule or slip by months.

This article gives you a complete, practical checklist of everything your IETM vendor needs from you, why each item matters, what format it should be in and what happens when something is missing or wrong.

What Does an IETM Vendor Actually Do with Your Inputs?

Before the checklist, you need to understand why the vendor needs documents in a specific way because this changes how you prepare them.

An IETM Level 4 is not a document. It is a web-based software application built on a relational database (SQL/MariaDB). Your vendor takes every manual, drawing, image and video you provide and rebuilds them from scratch inside a structured database using an authoring tool. The IETM Viewer software then reads that database and presents it interactively to the end user (Army, Navy, or IAF personnel).

This means your vendor is not simply importing a PDF. They are hand building your entire documentation set inside a database creating the table of contents hierarchy, hyperlinks between topics, hotspots on drawings, cross-references between manuals, user role filters and the global search index. Everything from scratch.