Excosoft remains with you as a long-term partner.
When working with our customers, we strongly believe in getting them up and running as quickly as possible. An implementation project should ideally take no more than a few months at most. At that point they should be able to operate our products and have already gained many of the benefits.
But that also means that there is more job to be done and more benefits to be had. We also believe in constant improvement. As our customers grow more confident about their initial investment, and more mature in terms of single sourcing, they often see new possibilities.
At these times it is our job to be there to support them in realizing these possibilities and get even more value out of using our products. Here are some of the more common improvements and optimizations.
Integrations can be very useful. Sometimes integrating systems are such a high priority that it is included in the initial implementation scope, but often it is left as an improvement to come.
Some examples of possible integrations are:
Fetching information from PDM/PLM/ERP systems to Skribenta can be automated to avoid manual copying of data. This saves time and prevents mistakes when copying things like product numbers and technical data.
Images and drawings can be fetched from drawings databases or digital asset management systems, to avoid manual work and make sure that the correct revision of each drawing is used.
The output from Skribenta can be automatically exported to ERP systems or other systems that are used to manage the completed documentation.
In many cases our customers start using our products in one area or department. After some time word gets out internally and the idea emerges to extend the usage to new areas or departments. We are always delighted to see our products get used, and gladly help this process.
Some issues that might come up in these cases is the need for additional migration of content, using multiple style sheets to support different formats or layout, and questions of how much content should be reused between different departments.
As the amount of content grows, it may be a good idea to periodically take a step back and review the content structure and reuse strategies that are used. Something that made a lot of sense when there were tens of documents in the system might need revision when there are hundreds.
Our translation memory Segment Localizer can help reduce translation cost as well as time to market significantly, just by using your content as is. But there are a number of ways to improve its efficiency even further and save even more:
Unifying terminology and phrasing to eliminate similar but not identical variants of the same texts in different contexts. Skribenta has functions that help with identifying and unifying such variants.
Marking up text that differs as values or product names that should not be translated helps Segment Localizer improve reuse as it can insert different values or product names in text segments that are otherwise identical.
Applying automatic unit conversion in Skribenta removes the need to send values for translation, even when they are expressed in units that need to be converted, such as metric to imperial units.
These finer points are not always the first priority when implementing a new system, but attending to them when the time is ripe can pay off.