Year of collaboration
2012 – ongoing
Context
British manufacturer of complex scientific instruments
Oxford Instruments Plasma Technology designs and produces customisable tools for leading industrial and scientific research communities. They produce etch and deposition plasma tools, which are used in the manufacturing of silicon chips, solar cells and LEDs.
Aim
Bespoke user manual creation for a wide range of products
Unlike most other customers, Oxford Instruments needs to produce a bespoke manual for every product shipped. They needed an expert authoring partner to understand their products, and to implement an efficient and consistent technical content strategy for their documentation going forward.
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Challenges
Complex bespoke products, and frequent delivery cycles
Each manufactured unit needs bespoke and clear documentation, delivered within a specific deadline, in order to be shipped on time. The technical authors would need to interpret complex information from the engineers, convey it clearly to the product user, including all necessary safety information, and deliver within short, regular delivery cycles.
Oxford Instruments also needed this documentation to be translated and localized into several languages, such as German, Dutch, and Italian, so a documentation partner with in-house localization capabilities was required.
Solution
An efficient outsourced technical authoring process
The 3di team:
- Provided a full audit of Oxford Instruments’ current documentation, and created a full Content Operations plan, including tools consultation, content migration, authoring, and localization.
- Oversaw the migration from the old method of using Microsoft Word, to using the more structured and controllable authoring tool Adobe FrameMaker.
- Created templates, styles, tags, and structures in FrameMaker to speed up the authoring of bespoke manuals.
- Created training modules for authors to learn about and keep up to date on Oxford Instruments products.
- Developed a streamlined workflow to analyse each product’s configuration and quickly understand what information is required in each manual.
- Applied SEMI standards for technical documentation to ensure Oxford Instruments meet its compliance obligations.
- Ensure the full suite of PDF and electronic manuals is ready and with Oxford Instruments in time for the product shipping.
- Provided translation and localization consultation and services in several languages, including French, German, Dutch, and Italian.
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Result
Improved technical documentation, on-time product shipping
- 3di now provides a full end-to-end content operations service for Oxford Instruments, including technical authoring, translation, and tools consultancy.
- Technical documentation delivered on time to ensure shipping dates are met.
- Consistent quality manuals written to the SEMI standard.
- For over a decade, Oxford Instruments has had an outsourced technical authoring partner that understands the products and can communicate easily with the engineers.