Together with Yamagata Europe, Gebroeders Geens revised their business strategy for technical product information. The new approach focuses on digitization, reuse, and efficiency.
For more than thirty years, Gebroeders Geens has been developing and manufacturing compact, versatile machines and attachments for road construction, agriculture and horticulture, residential construction, and industry. The company’s main products are the Rollmops, a compact transport machine for road workers, and the Knikmops, a powerful articulated loader.
Both products are light, solid and multifunctional machines that can be equipped for various specialized professional tasks by means of the many attachments. Heavy work on difficult terrain becomes light work thanks to the Rollmops and the Knikmops.
Need for clear instruction manuals
During development and production, Gebroeders Geens likes to emphasize user-friendliness. It is important that users can start up, use and maintain their machines reliably, quickly and correctly. This requires unambiguous and clear instructions in the form of user manuals.
After the retirement of their regular technical writer, the company decided to rethink their technical product information strategy. The ever-expanding range of attachments and the increasing demand from abroad prompted them to look at product information and work instructions differently. In addition, customer expectations around digital availability of information are growing.
Digital is the future
The traditional way of working, in which a machine is described only when it is completely finished, no longer meets today’s requirements. Technical documentation has undergone enormous development in recent years and is increasingly available in a digital form. This makes it possible to react quickly to new machine developments.
More specifically, the team at Gebroeders Geens wanted to have information about new functions or attachments quickly available, not only in Dutch, but also in other languages. Initially, this had to be in book form and online in PDF. In the future, the company will invest in making information available on an online portal or via an app.
Topics in XML
The company engaged Yamagata Europe to work out a new, forward-looking approach. As a result, when writing instructions, the team no longer starts from the idea that a book needs to be created. Instead, they now choose to describe functionalities of machines tailored to the end user.
The distinct functions are described in a structured way, considering consistent subject terminology. The functions are organized into topics, smaller subjects that can exist on their own and that can be reused easily throughout different manuals and in different publications.
Topics are created in XML. That makes it possible to switch to all kinds of digital platforms and publications in the future, and to a CCMS or other databases.
Information can now be quickly changed or added. Only the topics that need modification are modified. Authors also only have to make corrections once for different publications, and in different languages. The emphasis is on reuse. Thus, existing or approved content, or overlapping text can remain unchanged and only the updates have to go into production. This allows the team to reduce the amount of new text and to automate layouting, which reduces turnaround time and is cost-effective.
Everything open for the future
Gebroeders Geens looks into the future with ambition and continues to cherish its basic values of sustainability, trust and cooperation. This vision is now also reflected in the way they deal with product information.
By working with XML and topics, the company lays the foundation for multi-publishing to different applications and platforms in order to meet their customers’ requests for digital access to the product information they need. On top of that, this approach creates opportunities for sharing and reusing information across online help applications, service and repair applications as well as dealer platforms. Yamagata is proud to be part of this future.
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