The technical documentation that accompanies a company's products is often mandatory by law, and also part of the branding process and the creation of customer satisfaction. Producing it is expensive, and that's why it's increasingly important in today's globalised world to get it all right – content-wise, but also from the viewpoint of technical writing.

A key benefit of using Excosoft Skribenta is that it lets your company significantly reduce costs by automating the documentation process and managing translations. If you have a new product that requires an installation guide, and this manual is based on content from three other manuals, Skribenta enables you to generate a new manual in a matter of minutes using the existing content. For many large and medium-sized enterprises, this can lead to substantial savings within a year.

The technology for automating the production of user manuals is available to companies today, and this means that using manual production methods involving a large number of individual files is quickly being outdated. It is no longer the best solution to produce more simply by hiring more technical writers and editors, or bringing in additional consultants.

As an experiment, let's say you have 10 products, 20 product models, and that the manuals are translated into 30 languages. This means you will have 6,000 unique manuals to update manually... Time-consuming routine work that may include making minor changes, archiving versions, publishing on the web, using help text, and printing documents – all this can be done in a much more rational way, automatically.

Automation will lower costs and free up creativity

The final document, whether it is a user guide, installation instructions or technical specification, forms an integral part of product and market strategies. Excosoft's challenge is to increase your understanding of how this can be done using Skribenta.

Here is a shortlist of the reasons why you should automate your documentation production:

• Laborious, and often tedious routine work will be managed by Skribenta, which means that the need for more writers is significantly lessened.
• When the writer is instead free to write, this means he or she will focus more on the content that the customer needs to understand the product. The editor's time, skills and mind are used more effectively and creatively.
• A small organisation can handle more documents, which may enable consolidation of resources.
• Sharply reduced translation costs.
• Quality improvement and quality assurance.
• You can easily publish in many formats: PDF files for printing or viewing, HTML to publish online, in an online help system, for example.
• Makes it much easier to respond to the ever-changing legal requirements, manufacturing demands, international standards, and safety information.

Let the writers write!