The report entitled “Publishing Technical Communications to a Multi-Channel World”, published by Aberdeen Group, Inc., confirms the empolis approach to supporting customers meet Global Product Launch schedules and faster time-to-market.
To meet the demands of having to deliver higher quality, to more languages, in shorter timeframes with the same or less budget, leading manufacturers are turning to solution providers such as empolis to help them deliver products to existing and new markets faster and with fewer costs. The benchmark report specifically points out that those enterprises with best in class product documentation processes are using structured authoring and DITA, as well as utilising a modular or topic-based review process.
Key findings in the report include:
- Best in class enterprises are 67% more likely to use topic based review processes. Rather than sending a whole document for review, empolis customers can send an individual topic out for approval to subject matter experts, capture those comments quickly and easily, and send them back to the technical communication department for integration into the document. This is particularly important for discrete manufacturing enterprises using a platform-based approach to manufacturing, where typically, the level of similarity between different versions and variants of their products is very high.
- Best in class enterprises are twice as likely to use DITA. DITA allows product documentation to be written more concisely, improving its usability, and allows organisations to re-use content in more places. One empolis customer recently announced that for some product lines fully 78% of topics and graphics were used in more than one product document.
- Best in class enterprises track the success of their product documentation by monitoring support calls. empolis provide software not only for the creation, translation management, review and approval processes of product documentation, but also for the delivery of that information to call centres, field service agents and web self-service portals. As such, empolis customers are ideally placed to monitor the impact of documentation process changes on the number of support tickets coming in from customers and the field.
The full benchmark report is available for download free of charge (brief registration necessary). Click here to get to the registration form.
For further information please contact Jim Stock on +49 5241 80-74404 or jim.stock[aet]empolis.com
