GÜTERSLOH, Germany, June 12 /PRNewswire/ --
-- New Report on Best Practices in Product Documentation Confirms Empolis Approach for Forbes Global 2000 Manufacturers
empolis GmbH, a leading provider of Component Content Management software for customer-centric product information, today highlighted key findings from a recent benchmark report titled "Publishing Technical Communications to a Multi-Channel World". The report, published by Aberdeen Group, Inc., confirms the empolis approach to supporting customers meet Global Product Launch schedules and faster time-to-market.
"When it comes to Product Information such as Operator Manuals, Service Information or Technical Marketing material, our customers are under increasing pressure to deliver higher quality, to more languages, in shorter timeframes with the same or less budget", says Andreas Rempe, Vice President of empolis GmbH.
To meet these demands, 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.
"Product documentation is as important as the product itself - in many industries, customers can't launch in a country until the product information is available in the local language. Additionally, a delay in product information or poor quality of documentation directly impacts the revenue streams our customers can expect from their products. Therefore, it's absolutely critical that product documentation is shipped at launch and with a high quality. The quality of product documentation becomes an important point in the view of potential customers and their products comparisons. In some cases it generates a USP", explains Rempe.
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.
Rempe again: "The Aberdeen report correctly highlights the correlation between industry best practises such as working on content at a component level, using standards such as DITA, and deriving a dollar impact figure on documentation process improvements and the Best in Class performers."
For more detail on Aberdeen Group's findings, please visit http://www.aberdeen.com/link/sponsor.asp... to download the full benchmark report free of charge.
About empolis:
empolis - The Information Logistics Company - offers enterprise content and knowledge management solutions for company-wide information logistics and for improving business processes. empolis' core competencies are information management, service management, product & catalog management and media management.
As a full service supplier, empolis delivers everything from consulting, design and creation to implementation of solutions - from a single source.
empolis is an arvato AG subsidiary. arvato is the international media and communications service supplier within the Bertelsmann group and therefore belongs to a unique network of over 270 companies in 37 countries. Among them are printing companies, data storage media manufacturers, logistics and IT service organisations. empolis employs 180 people in Germany and Poland.
For more information:
arvato AG Public Relations
Tel: +49-(0)5241-80-3408
Fax: +49-(0)5241-80-3315
For more information: arvato AG Public Relations, Tel: +49-(0)5241-80-3408, Fax: +49-(0)5241-80-3315
