"Previously, we spent more time on administrative tasks rather than the production of our manuals. With Skribenta, we were able to automate many of these tasks."

Since 2000, the NIBE Industrier Group has grown very quickly. In six years, the number of employees increased from 1 900 to 5 600 and the number of global offices doubled from 7 to 15. NIBE Industrier has three business areas: NIBE Element, NIBE Heating and NIBE Stoves. The Nibe Industrier Group, which has been listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange since 1997, is headquartered in Markaryd, Sweden. NIBE Heating is also located here and is the business unit that implemented Skribenta.

NIBE Heating's rapid growth also meant that product development and launches into new markets needed to be done faster than ever before. The product range had evolved into more technologically advanced products for heating, ventilation, cooling and heat recovery. The time to market and increased number of product models was having a direct impact on NIBE’s technical document quality and ability to meet the tight deadlines. As with all companies, the quality and accuracy of the documentation provided to the customer is extremely important, especially as a primary reason that customer's purchased NIBE’s products was to save money with their energy efficient products.

Even the best publishing and layout programs reach a limit

As the number of products being developed increased and the turn-around time to market decreased, the marketing and technical documentation departments found it more difficult to keep up. To compete globally meant that all of NIBE’s marketing and technical content needed to be translated into many more languages. Managing these translations, which becomes increasingly more complex when changes are made, meant that the company needed to start automating many tasks in order to increase productivity, reduce errors and maintain a consistent brand message.

Any documentation that accompanies a product is an important part of the customer experience. The content of each document can significantly impact how a consumer uses a product and how well they understand and implement features, such as maximizing energy savings. The user guide or technical specifications may be read by a wide variety of people, from installers to home owners, and it is very important that the information is accurate and consistent.

Niclas Sternegård leads the Working Group responsible for the production of all technical documentation. He says that the rapid industry growth and a broader product range have revealed the limitations of one of his department's most important working tools.

"The whole department is working in a graphic design layout program, which also has features to streamline both the creative production processes and repetitive tasks. Yet it is difficult to keep up with document production. The number of languages we translate into has increased dramatically and it takes a lot of time to complete routine tasks. It has simply become too much to keep track of everything. Just to make changes to all language versions can take a few days for one person to complete. For the manuals that we have entered into Skribenta, we can see that there are significant time savings…”

Niclas and his colleague’s experiences are similar to the majority of companies in the manufacturing industry. However, more than 90% of all document production is still done with publishing tools such as Word, FrameMaker and InDesign. Using a automated database allows for the separation of content from design, it is the design and formatting that often consumes considerable resources.

Niclas identified a risk factor when using a traditional layout program to manage many different versions, sometimes with small differences. When a change is made manually in many languages, one is always at risk to miss something. To eliminate the risk requires more time and concentration from writer, time that could be spent instead on quality content.

"We were faced with a situation where we knew that in the future we would need to hire more employees unless we switched to a publishing system that could help us to streamline both the work and the the risk of errors,." said Niclas.

Added value for technical documents to work with content instead of design

In 2006, the company decided to invest in a publishing system for their technical publications while still using the existing graphic design software for the department's targeted marketing, advertising and in-house activities.

"We looked at a wide variety of solutions where document publishing was merely a submodule. Then we found Excosoft Skribenta. Quite quickly we experienced significant benefits using Skribenta to manage our technical documentation. We felt that we had significant added value with Skribenta because of Excosoft’s commitment to continue developing Skribenta imaging module. This was a contributing factor as to why we finally chose Skribenta."

Is Skribenta a good fit for our company?

Skribenta is an open, scalable, XML-based publishing system developed specifically to meet the requirements of internationally manufacturing firms. In general, if a company needs to translate into more than three languages and manuals that are more than 20 pages in length, would benefit and save money by using Skribenta or any similar XML environment.

NIBE Heating's technical documentation requirements were a perfect fit for making the transition to Skribeta. Niclas Sternegård believed that improved document quality and time savings benefits would outweigh the task of moving from using one system (the graphic design software) to another.

Niclas and his team were initially worried about the transition and integration of Skribenta with the existing graphic design software. "As we started to work with Skribenta, it became easier to work within the new way of thinking (the rules) and develop new information flows that helped us with our document production. We now have an automated work flow with a completely different control over changes because Skribenta tracks changes instead of the technical writer. We do not have to do as much manual work to update all the versions of the documents. This allows us to focus on writing our main Swedish version.”

Niclas continues. "That we can concentrate on working with content and do not need to think about the formatting allows us to spend more time on creating quality content. Production flow is much faster with Skribenta. We now have the capacity to produce many more manuals in more languages than at present, although our department is still growing."