Process Improvements Slash Time-to-Publish 75%

The Institution of Engineering and Technology

The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) is a multidisciplinary professional engineering institution formed in 2006 from two separate institutions: the Institution of Electrical Engineers, dating back to 1871, and the Institution of Incorporated Engineers dating back to 1884. With nearly 160,000 members in 127 countries, the IET is working to engineer a better world. Its mission is to inspire, inform, and influence the global engineering community, supporting technology innovation to meet the needs of society.

The IET provides a global knowledge network to facilitate the exchange of ideas and promote the positive role of science, engineering, and technology in the world. The IET’s knowledge resources are world-renowned with 27 specialist journals and over 400 eBooks representing the breadth and depth of the profession across five key sectors: Built Environment, Design and Production, Energy, Information and Communications, and Transport.

Challenge

IET’s print-centric workflow and limited automation resulted in a long cycle to create printed content. Digital products were created from print resulting in a long gap between completing content authoring and digital publishing. The IET needed to provide a central repository for asset management and to simplify and automate workflow, status tracking, and notifications to users. They also needed to move to a media-neutral content creation process.

• For Academic Books, the IET needed to move book materials to a central repository for asset management and simplify and automate the workflow. They also desired status tracking and to improve the capture of book metadata both for managing book creation and for the discoverability of book products in the marketplace.
• For Practitioner Books containing standards-oriented content that is very granular and has substantial linking both within and across the book products, links were added to e-products after print generation and were time-consuming to recreate manually for each edition. The IET solution needed to maximize content reuse and provide the ability to track changes across editions of the books.

The IET sought a workflow that would result in:

• Delivery of digital book products as soon as content authoring and expert review are complete.
• Reduced time to create pages after content is authored.

Solution

Contiem was engaged to devise and implement a content solution for IET. Contiem’s RSuite component content management system (CCMS) was configured to automate the ingestion of journal articles after the peer review process and then manage the publishing process through to publication.

The Contiem RSuite project team recommended to The IET an implementation of the DITA for Publishers (D4P) framework. RSuite’s browser-based XML editing module allows The IET staff to edit the structured content and incorporates a visual tool for searching for and building the necessary links. Reviewers will receive automatically-generated PDF proofs that identify modifications since the previous version. Once the content is approved, it is automatically flowed into Adobe InDesign for print layout, so eliminating The IET’s conversion costs and speeding the time to publication for both print and electronic products.

For IET, Contiem implemented the RSuite CCMS and a DITA XML-based content authoring system with automation features providing the following benefits:

• RSuite CCMS vastly improved and simplified the publishing workflow with automated date stamping, tracking, and reporting.
• RSuite CCMS greatly expanded metadata capture; users can now easily create and update all metadata required for ONIX generation and delivery to vendors.
• RSuite CCMS enabled content reuse for new editions with no loss of content.
• The D4P framework via RSuite’s browser-based XML editing module allows IET staff to edit the structured content and incorporates a visual tool for searching for and building the necessary links. In the past hyperlinks had to be completely recreated for each edition.
• Adobe InDesign automated the placement of change bars — an important feature for users who need to know how the standards have changed.
• RSuite CCMS automated generation of on-the-fly PDFs for committee review that include change markup.
• RSuite CCMS ensures that, once the content is approved, it is automatically flowed into InDesign for print layout.

Results

All of IET’s journals, academic books, and standards books are in RSuite. IET also uses RSuite to create, manage, and deliver content to the ONIX cloud. IET has enjoyed the following benefits:

• Print books that previously took two months to create in InDesign now take two weeks.
• Data conversion costs for its content were reduced.
• InDesign work was reduced with automated creation of files that now can be flowed directly.
• Digital content is now delivered as soon as content is complete – three months sooner.