Automating Your Technical Publishing Processes

The quality of your technical publications directly influences the success of your products. Ninety-percent of published information is stale; customers are overloaded with information, but usually cannot find what they need; the field force is dispatched to service calls with incorrect instructions; help desks desperately shuffle through a myriad of papers only to find obsolete answers; manufacturers frequently publish incomplete or outdated information. It’s no wonder that customer satisfaction is low, service costs are growing and legal exposure is high.

Creating and using redundant, inconsistent and unstructured information for formal publishing requirements is a recipe for failure. Just as you wouldn’t tolerate uncontrolled data in your organization’s financial management systems, you can no longer afford to handle your intellectual content in an uncontrolled, unconstrained, error-prone and highly labor-intensive manner. The fact is: poor information quality directly impacts the overall success of the product.

Traditional desktop publishing contributes to the problem.The problem of widespread, inaccurate publishing is caused by the fact that, traditionally, technical publications have not been considered a key part of the product development process. As a result, the process of developing technical publications has fallen far behind the advances in product development and manufacturing and often does not take full advantage of the rich content (CAD data) developed during the design process. Typically, resulting technical documents don’t match the product configuration and don’t meet customer expectations—decreasing overall satisfaction and perceived value.

By using traditional publishing software, authors typically waste 30% to 50% of their time formatting documents instead of focusing solely on content creation and improvement. Often, authors must recreate content that already exists because that content can’t be located or easily referenced for re-creation. Inconsistencies in the sequence and structure of information across similar documents make the information difficult for readers to understand. Lastly, lack of an automated publishing process forces authors to manually update multiple documents whenever a product or service changes, which is a time-consuming and error-prone process.

When should you adopt automated publishing? You should consider evaluating the benefits of replacing traditional desktop publishing or word processing software if your content has one or more of the following characteristics:

• Multi-channel delivery. When you have to deliver content in multiple formats and media types, automated publishing can help you eliminate the redundant, manual tasks required to format your content for each media type.
• Multiple embedded diagrams. Automated publishing enables you to embed interactive illustrations, which automatically update when content changes, thus eliminating inaccurate, out-of-date graphics.
• Large volume. Automated publishing eliminates the time and cost of author’s manually formatting documents.
• Repeatable processes. Automated publishing enables you to enforce document style and structure rules for frequently published documents, improving readability and utility for consumers of that information.
• Personalized content. Automated publishing enables you to automatically personalize information for users, based on criteria specific to your individual customers’ needs.
• Configurable products. If you manufacture highly configurable products with multiple user options, automated publishing enables you to automatically produce documents that are specific to each product configuration.
• Dynamic content. If portions of your content change frequently, such as prices, dates, seasonal provisions or configuration requirements, automated publishing enables you to ensure that your documents are always up-to-date with the most recent information.
• Interactive content. With automated publishing, you can take advantage of interactive features in electronic delivery media without needing to build-in extra time
  in your processes to manually add these features to your content.

Keys To Automating Your Technical Publishing Process

Technical publications must become an integral part of the product development process. Documentation should be developed concurrently with your product, dynamically configured to match specific products, and delivered in the form and format your customers require. Your publishing process should draw on and repurpose design data, and should leverage the abundance of product knowledge created and collected during the product development process.

The keys to successful automation of the publication process are:

• Componentization—enables you to create a single source of information, so that making just one change can update multiple documents at once;
• Absolutely consistent structure and data format. It is impossible to automate the publishing of documents that don’t
  have identical formatting and identical structures;
• Separating the information from its style or presentation. This way, you can use the same information in different types of documents, having different formatting, without manually modifying the information itself;
• Maintaining your intellectual content as a single source of componentized information. This helps to reduce or eliminate redundancy, and enables you to reduce translation costs to only those information components that have changed. It also eliminates redundant review and edit cycles, and ensures the integrity and accuracy of your information; and
• Automatic creation of technical illustrations. The publishing system must provide capabilities to create illustrations that would leverage accurate product
  design data and automatically update all illustrations when product designs or
  configurations change.

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PTC (Nasdaq: PMTC) provides leading product lifecycle management (PLM), content management and dynamic publishing solutions to more than 40,000 companies worldwide. PTC customers include the world’s most innovative companies in manufacturing, publishing, services, government and life sciences industries. PTC is included in the S&P Midcap 400 and Russell 2000 indices. For more information on PTC, please visit www.ptc.com.

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