The Metso Corporation employs around 28 000 people globally. Metso Minerals, a division of Metso, provides solutions and equipment for rock and minerals processing. Metso Minerals have operations in more than 100 countries and employs over 10 000 people. Around 250 of these individuals are located in Sala, Sweden and they work on a variety of projects related to mineral processing systems.

The unit in Sala has product responsibility for the Metso Minerals product lines, process equipment and slurry pumps. The pumps are used in the hydraulic transport of solid materials and materials with sand-like consistency of such mines and the steel industry.

“Skribenta enabled us to keep up with a very fast sales development process”

As the demand for ores and mining commodities has increased in recent years, the mining industry has experienced a boom. Old mines, which closed in the late 90's, reopened. Because the existing mines often had old equipment, these needed replacing or upgrading. The increased demand for Metso's products enabled the company to add new employees which included an expansion in product lines and the need to better manage their documentation. A constant development process was required to ensure customer satisfaction and increase competitiveness. It is very important that the information provided to the customer is as accurate and timely as possible as downtime in the mining and construction industry is very costly. Metso Mineral's ongoing goals are to provide excellent products and short delivery times. However, the short delivery times place high demands on all project phases, in particular the documentation production phase. This is where the need for a product like Skribenta became more apparent to Metso.

A few hours instead of two days

Metso Minerals has worked for many years in a traditional documentation environment where technical writers spend a lot of time searching for documents and content and then manually format the document with a traditional software layout program. For Metso Minerals, this also included the use of CAD software to manage drawings. The documentation provided to the customers are usually between 60 and 120 pages, published in English with additional translations into German, Spanish, Russian, and Finnish. As the product lines continued to change and there was a rapid expansion of the company, the documentation department faced new challenges. How were Metso going to continue creating high quality manuals at an increased rate, with decreased lead times, and without hiring new staff?

Dan Redlund, one of two writers / editors at Metso Minerals explains how Skribenta was the answer.

"We came to a point where we simply had difficulty keeping up with, and having control over, all the documents while still enabling each project's unique information to be included in the manuals. Although we do not have many different products (in terms of numbers) each product is available in many different models. This complicates the documentation production. We realized that we needed to streamline and automate some of our manual tasks. It also was important that we could concentrate all records and documents consistently and using reliable software."

A decision was made to try Excosoft Skribenta for a few months. Right away a difference as noticed. Instead of a large number of individual documents, the department works on the basis of eight "super" documents. Each document is divided into subgroups in which each product model may be included in slightly different configurations. In the first quarter of 2008, while Skribenta was implemented, Dan immediately saw a significant time savings.

"I made a comparison between the previous documentation software to Skribenta to see how much faster it was possible to collect the documents and other information that we needed to produce a final manual. The compilation previously took two days whereas with Skribenta and the super manual concept, it took just over three hours. We are already seeing that we will save much time and that we can keep up with more intensive documentation production timelines without hiring more staff. "

We started document production using Skribenta after just three days

Dan Redlund's department had high expectations when it came to implementing both a new technology and way of thinking about their documents. So when it took only three days after Skribenta was installed to start producing manuals, Dan was thrilled.

"Skribenta is a great system with broad functionality so we chose to move progressively forward. In the beginning we focused on understanding the basic functions. Then we took a new step where we learned a new feature before it went into operation, and then we continued with a staged implementation. For us it has worked well to do in this way and the transition was facilitated by the fact that we got very good support from Excosoft", concludes Dan.

Gains through automation with Skribenta

• Increased output - time to produce more without hiring new staff
• Improved control - the end product is based on a number of super-manuals instead of a variety of documents
• Increased time savings - significantly less time needed to compile data and produce a finished document