Quality Management: Product Documentation Undergoing a Shift

Quality Management: Product Documentation Undergoing a Shift

As you know, Mr. or Ms. Business Person, we now are engaged in an international market economy due to Globalization and the Information Revolution. The Forbes Global 2000 manufacturers of complicated, technological products are under stressful competitive pressure to create and ship products quicker, in higher quantities and with increasing customization. If you are a manufacturer who has not come out of the Industrial Age mindset, you are losing revenue and market share to competitors who have harnessed the power of product information.

What does this mean to documentation?

These days the documentation is embedded in the product—user and maintenance manuals, customer service and support, online help and sales and marketing collateral—all things that define the customer’s experience. In the global economy we can add that this documentation is likely to go to different countries where people speak different languages.
With the products becoming more complex, documentation has become critical, but constantly morphing as your business and other businesses have had to adopt automated technologies enabling the dynamic creation and publishing of product content.

Product Documentation

Today you simply cannot ship products without documentation. If you don’t have any, the product features will go unknown to the users. Market specific items won’t be properly branded and customized. Support and maintenance, service and other document-driven functions won’t be delivered. Thus in ISO 9000 parlance, you won’t be able to confirm compliance one way or another.
Documentation must be done rapidly by manufacturers and be economical as well. It must be consistent, clear and accurate. Last-minute documents can create changes setting off a chain reaction of delays in documentation and therefore delivery of the product, which ends with lost revenue.
On the other hand a company which already has proper documentation but is in a hurry might re-create content instead of using what is already available. This is not a good idea since all new content needs to be reviewed and approved, causing time-consuming and product delaying processes. Then the re-created material need to be translated, formatted for publication into digital and/or print formats. What this re-creation does is incur double the cost and time for one piece of content. Not a good idea at all.
Besides these hard costs, re-creation imposes soft costs. Content consistency and accuracy are possibly compromised. Let’s look at an example. Information found in a user manual might be described with different wording online. Diagrams and graphics might be different in different places. While this can be annoying, it can also be life threatening as well as result in lost sales and possible lawsuits.

By being stuck in the Industrial Age your business can be affected by market forces and trends such as velocity, volume and variability.

Velocity. Because of the greater amount of competition you want to release products more quickly than you did a few years ago. This velocity is driving shortened time-to-market that then drives shorter sales cycles and higher revenues. Velocity means you have to improve the operational efficiencies when it comes to document publication more rapidly. Your new and improved product needs new and improved content which you need to publish more rapidly and accurately to be ready for the customer.

Volume. Competition is increasing the amount of new product lines and services. So you have to not only keep up with increasing your product creation but with increased content creation. Whether you are selling smart phones or pacemakers, you are competing with other producers. You have to keep up with the creation of timely, accurate documentation and if you are doing ISO 9000, all this documentation is strictly regulated.

Variability. To reach new markets and tap new opportunities you probably are increasing your product variability. Customers are going to want customized information delivered in many different formats—print manual, PDFs, information within a device and online. Then there are all the places your product can go in the globalized economy where you will have to have documentation in different languages, mass customization, and branding.

What is looming in the future for your company?

If you are creating complicated, techno-centric products, you need to be aware of the opportunities to use your product documentation in new ways. In doing so, you will have to undergo a fundamental mind shift in your perspective and emphasis. You will need to recognize that the real value of your product rests in the quality of the information you create for its use.