Problem Description

Danfoss Drives produces approximately 100 manuals containing product information ranging from 1 to 200 pages. The manuals are translated to 15 different languages.

The process of creating and maintaining the product information was based on traditional Desktop Publishing in PageMaker and MS Word and involved a lot of problems as difficulties to reuse information, very high costs and long lead times for translations and DTP. To combat these problems in the process of authoring, updating and translating the information, Danfoss Drives decided to move from the old process to XML-based manual production and publishing.

Solution

Sorona Innovation helped Danfoss Drives to implement and adjust an XML-based authoring and publishing system to convert the manuals into reusable components that could be dynamically reassembled with each drive.

The system consists of an authoring environment based on the Epic XML Editor from Arbortext. All XML information is created in Epic and stored and controlled in a database / document management system.

The authors work with small XML components, ranging from a few lines of text to a few pages, rather than a complete manual. When an XML component is created or updated, the review and translation stages are rather quick and easy tasks.

The information created becomes automatically published either as high quality paper printouts or as web-based information. This leaves the authors the possibility to disregard layout issues and instead keep focus on the information content.

Business Benefits

Danfoss Drives product information can now be easily retrieved and reused, rather than recreated every time a new drive is manufactured. As a result, Danfoss has seen many gains, for example:

• The group has increased time to market and decreased manufacturing costs.
• Authors are freed to spend more time on creating content, and have cut almost all of the time they previously spent formatting.
• Rather than taking six weeks to manufacture a drive, it now only takes three weeks.
• Manuals can now be modified in 1.5 days, as opposed to four weeks.
• Translation and writing processes can be carried out in parallel.
• Workflow optimized system.