July 2013
Streamlining your documentation processes with a practical content strategy
Safety starts with quality. The best product is only as good as its documentation and technical data made available to the customer.
Case study
Our customer, the Finn-Power Group, established in 1969, is a multinational group of companies specialising in sheet metal working technology with 2 manufacturing sites in Italy, 1 in the US and 1 in Finland.
Industry concerns
Customer documentation is a vital and integral part of Finn-Power’s comprehensive range of machinery. Most crucially, the documentation needs to do its part to ensure the safe and correct use of the product by providing complete, accurate and effective information.
Additionally, with the EU machinery directive in place and the EU now comprising of 28 countries, there is a regulatory need for clear and accurate translation into many different languages as well as specific, safety-related content.
Using Simplified Technical English ASD-STE100 to create user content
To make content easier to understand as well as faster and cheaper to translate, Dr Frans Wijma gave training to Finn-Power’s team of technical translators, writers and documentation manager in the rules and practical application of this international standard. Course participants did a complete rewrite of selected sample documents in Simplified Technical English.
Finn-Power has successfully implemented ASD-STE100 since 2010 with the continuous support from the team at Shufra.
ASD-STE100 standardises vocabulary, grammar and style, while letting companies control their specific terminology (Technical Names). The ASD-STE100 standard is widely used in industries ranging from aerospace to IT, consumer electronics, automotive and machinery.
The next step – formulating/designing a useful information structure
Taking on the other important aspect of documentation is the structural reuse of content and optimizing technical means for reuse. With all their business requirements in mind, Finn-Power was looking for a highly intuitive, low-threshold content management solution (CMS).
We tapped into our partner network and found Author-it to be the perfect fit with the customer’s requirements as it includes a translation management module that allows users to efficiently and effectively manage multilingual content. Author-it allows you to reuse content with a high level of granularity. While most CMS systems just let you reuse whole blocks of text, Author-it allows for text reuse on the sentence level, doing away with the need to define portions of text intended for reuse.
Said Ms Hanna Korpinen, Manager of R&D and Documentation:
”Now that we have also taken on this other important aspect of documentation, we are better positioned to provide quality documentation to our customers on-time and within budget!”
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