Years of collaboration
2021
Context
A global leader in high-performance printers
Fujifilm SIS is a global technology leader and manufacturer of high-performance inkjet inks and pigment dispersions, supplying products in 86 countries and employing over 600 people.
Fujifilm had transitioned from adapting third-party products to innovating with their own unique flat-bed, roll-to-roll, and hybrid large-format printers. With a roadmap of 5 product families, scheduled for launch over a 2-year period, Fujifilm realised that they needed to establish an efficient and scalable approach to creating new documentation.
Aim
Scaling up the documentation process to support a new product
Fujifilm needed help scaling up their content creation. They asked 3di to help them find solutions to improve the end-to-end documentation creation, formatting, ongoing maintenance, and distribution of technical and user documentation for these systems globally.
With the upcoming launch of a new printer, Fujifilm decided this would be the best candidate product to use for prototyping a new documentation process. They needed to create a customer-focused User Manual and a Service/Partner-focused Install Guide for this new printer, which needed to meet compliance standards, help their customers get the most from their investment, and enable their local partners to prepare, install, maintain, and service the products themselves.
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Challenges
Creating a new documentation process whilst getting ready for a product launch
The 3di team needed to quickly get up to speed on the new printer, as well as create and implement new workflows, before documentation could be published and delivered to the sales team and clients.
As Fujifilm was still in the process of developing their new printer, any content created needed to be easily updated with each iteration of the hardware.
Their documentation was produced in Microsoft Word and distributed as PDF. There were frequent updates to documents as their products were updated and then the documents needed to be redistributed, reviewed, and re-published. The creation and review process was laborious and slow as documents could grow to over 400 pages. The documentation for each machine was written by separate authors and much of the content was boilerplate, or common to multiple machines, but this content was duplicated, not single-sourced, leading to duplication of work and inconsistency.
Solution
Providing a full content operations service
The 3di team:
- Recommended a content model, toolset, and scalable authoring and publishing workflow.
- Created content plans for each priority document which maximised the opportunity to reuse information.
- Prototyped the approach with Fujifilm’s product.
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Result
A full content operations review, and a new documentation processes handed back to Fujifilm’s internal team
The 3di team:
- Created two documents; the Acuity Prime Operation Manual and the Acuity Prime Installation Manual. These documents were able to be used as marketing materials as well, shared with potential clients at trade shows.
- Implemented an authoring and review process that improved cooperation between the authors and engineering, producing a higher-quality document.
- Trained Fujifilm’s internal documentation team on the new tools and processes, and successfully handed over the new content process to them.