Making a difference…

Services case study

Parker Domnick Hunter is part of the Parker Hannifin Corporation (Parker), a leading worldwide supplier in motion and control technologies and systems, providing precision engineered solutions for a wide variety of commercial, mobile, industrial and aerospace markets.

The many group operations are divided into two business segments - Industrial and Process Operations. www.domnickhunter.com

Challenge

For years Domnick Hunter had been producing detailed technical manuals for their products, using a desktop publishing software application on a Mac platform. Created originally for the home market, the manuals had been replicated into a number of European languages, often as multilingual publications.

With the advent of the enlarged European Union, Domnick Hunter faced the challenge of supplying its products and supporting materials into an expanded market, involving some 25 target languages.

Whilst the original Mac solution had worked adequately when producing a minimal number of languages, it now proved far too cumbersome and time consuming to handle their complex and growing number of multilingual technical manuals.

Domnick Hunter needed a software application better suited to their multilingual text-intensive technical manuals, one that would solve their issues while significantly reducing document production, time and money.

Approach and solution

Flexibility, quality, technical expertise and building great relationships are all part and parcel of the LIT approach to their customers.

Having been a preferred supplier to Domnick Hunter for 15 years, LIT recognised the issues Domnick Hunter were experiencing and took the proactive approach of putting forward recommendations to dramatically improve Domnick Hunter’s source materials and accelerate their translation process.

LIT advised Domnick Hunter that to speed-up production of their documentation, increase productivity and ensure consistent formatting they should create all new source documents and legacy materials using Adobe FrameMaker™ for PC - a powerful authoring and publishing solution for technical communicators who want to author and publish technical documentation in multiple languages.

Fully aware of the pain involved in moving authoring platform solutions, LIT worked hand-in-hand with Domnick Hunter:
• Advising on document creation to keep the source files translation friendly and therefore reducing the time and cost of translation going forward.
• Creating a FrameMaker™ template for Domnick Hunter manuals.
• Supplying ongoing support in the use of FrameMaker™, ensuring additions to the initial template remained translation friendly.

Results and benefits

In an industry where time-to-market is crucial Domnick Hunter are now reaping the benefits of change. Whilst the transition to any new software application brings a number of challenges, Domnick Hunter have found key advantages to using FrameMaker™:
• With the more automated formatting structure achievable with FrameMaker™ there’s far less room to make stylistic errors, therefore quality and the whole look of the document is much improved and more consistent.
• The “book” feature provides a way to organise any number of files so that they can be produced together, greatly facilitating operations, such as cross-reference solution; table of contents; index and list generation; page numbering; paragraph and figure numbering; and batch printing.
• The availability of conditional text allows Domnick Hunter to show or hide specific text in a document, removing the need to produce separate documents which contain largely the same content. (Of particular benefit when producing manuals for similar models in the same product range).
• Features such as book-level search and replace allow Domnick Hunter to make multilevel, book-wide modifications in seconds.
• The use of variables allows issue numbers and dates to be managed more easily and updated across multiple files.
• Inserting graphics by reference rather than by embedding them into the file itself reduces file size and greatly simplifies the translation process.
• Tables that once took hours to create now take minutes. Working hand-in-hand with LIT, Domnick Hunter have seen post translation DTP cost per page on FrameMaker™ documents reduce by a sizable 62%, when compared with the equivalent costs incurred on their original legacy manuals. Overall costs and time-to-market have been kept to a minimum.

Ray Flynn, Domnick Hunter’s Technical Author comments: “As a manufacturer of first class filtration, purification, and separation solutions, it is essential that our technical manuals are of the highest standard. LIT has been instrumental in helping us achieve this. By switching to Adobe FrameMaker™ we have been able to develop a modular approach to writing our technical manuals. By creating generic modules and standardising on data format we have reduced the time it takes to compile new manuals. The additional benefit to this is that the cost of translation has been significantly reduced as we only require the new modules to be translated.”