ITT Fluid Technology

Challenge

ITT Fluid Technology is the world’s largest supplier of pumps and systems solutions to treat, transport, and control water. Products are delivered via three global business units, each with its own technical documentation in a different format. As a result, ITT had numerous content repositories with dated, redundant, non-localized, and non-reusable information, making it difficult to meet customer information needs and cross-selling requirements and to efficiently support organizational needs.

Localization and translation had become significant cost factors for ITT. In addition, the lag in delivering information in smaller market languages is one of ITT’s legacy documentation problems. For example, the source documentation for a new pump product may be delivered at launch in a number of “major” languages, but it takes much longer to reach smaller language markets, which impacts company sales.

ITT sought to develop a single source of all content, available globally in a reusable format, governed by the right processes, tools, and controls for multiple publication outputs to multiple channels.

Solution

ITT brought together a team of expert consultants who set up the standard platform, XML tool set, and processes for achieving a global enterprise content management (GECM) system.

The team developed process flows, a DITA information model, authoring guidelines, style sheets, graphics standards, and terminology standards to support training global team members on the new tools and processes.

Contiem was selected as the U.S. partner to participate in the pilot program to test the GECM system. The Contiem project manager, information architects, writers, and illustrators worked closely with European counterparts to coordinate standards, tasks, and workflow procedures with oversight from ITT Shared Services. During the pilot, Contiem worked with the rest of the team to address both architectural and process issues. The result was a successful pilot project, and Contiem was engaged to continue with the migration of legacy Installation, Operation and Maintenance Manuals (IOMs) to the GECM system. The significant benefits of content reuse were realized as more documents were migrated to the GECM platform.

Result

GECM is now ITT’s primary system for producing, publishing, and translating the IOMs worldwide. The successful implantation of the GECM system has garnered strong cost and time savings for ITT.

• The company was paying about 25 cents per word for translation. That cost has dropped to five cents per word, an 80% reduction.
• ITT now experiences a 70 – 90% rate of reuse of translation for words and topics.

In addition, ITT has reduced the lag time for reaching smaller language markets.

Design and structure play an important role in the ability to reuse content and efficiently localize and translate technical documents. Contiem works with its customers to fully understand their business structure and environment in order to establish the most cost-effective solutions. Moreover, Contiem develops processes and procedures to maximize content reuse and reduce translation time and costs.