The Manufacturing Industry Blog

Acquire new customers and your business will grow. It’s simple, right? New customers are everywhere. Our expanding, global economy opens up markets for new customers in just about every corner of the world. We just need to reach them. Unfortunately, it’s not always as easy as it sounds. However, we see some interesting trends. Progressive organizations can take advantage of emerging digital technologies to reach potential new customers and service remote markets.

Two years ago Bob McDonald, the CEO of Procter and Gamble, unveiled his goal to bring 1 billion new customers to the company by 2015. Although the goal is aggressive, P&G have committed fully to achieving it. To reach these customers, P&G leverages its internal expertise, and a network of strategic partners to open up new channels. The company also plans to use a series of newer technologies to accelerate growth.

Deploying New Technology in Remote Markets

All organizations have a Web presence today. But the digital world changes rapidly, and companies can become very creative using the Web and new computing models to increase sales activity.  This provides new opportunities to enable organizations and distribution partners in ways not possible in the past. Organizations can deploy electronic or digital catalogs, e-brochures, and personalized marketing messages to cost-effectively reach millions of potential clients. These techniques are cost effective, becoming more interactive, and provide the consumer with multiple ways to engage with the company and its distribution partners.

The consumer electronics market helps drive this trend, with mobile computing devices such as smart phones and tablet computers leading the way  Apple’s iPad has been on the market for a year and several competitive products will be introduced in 2011.   The adoption rate of these devices exceeds initial expectations and change the way people consume content, learn, communicate and interact. As such, these devices provide an excellent platform to extend an organization’s marketing and sales reach, enabling a team to deploy strategies and take advantage of this trend quickly.

Servicing Remote Markets

For more sophisticated products, companies require an educated field support organization to sell, install and service these products during the product’s lifetime. But these sales, distribution and installation partners all need training. To do this, firms must establish remote service organizations enabled to provide proper product support. In many cases, a local market partner, and not a direct company employee, will provide this support.  These changing requirements can represent significant barriers to success.

Companies have long designed and built products for sustainability and to align with field service capabilities. Organizations developed better product documentation to assist with installation, usability and long-term maintenance. But designing products and documentation around a field services organization that doesn’t yet exist is a new challenge.

Smart companies not only leverage new technology trends to reach new customers, they take advantage of these tools in the service and support world as well. We see  evolving technology, such as streaming video and collaborative problem-solving tools, becoming an integral part of the support model. These tools make  it easier to train and equip service personnel in a more timely and cost-effective manner. These also enable more sophisticated consumers who require a self-service or do-it-yourself maintenance capability. These techniques significantly speed the enablement of skilled resources at a significantly lower cost.

There are many other examples of how technology allows organizations to expand into new markets.   Over the next several months, I’ll share other thoughts about these trends.  Stay tuned to this blog and please share any ideas you have.

 - Rich Baily, Vice President of Business Development, Global Manufacturing Account Organization, Xerox Corporation

In today’s economic environment, manufacturing companies need to downsize real estate and eliminate non-core functions in facilities and operations to help reduce capital expenditures and overall costs.   I worked with a global manufacturer of tires recently to do just that.

To downsize space and operations, this manufacturer planned to move into a new World Headquarters building. Because the new location was smaller, the company had to limit the move to core business operations and processes only.  Previously, this firm had invested in a large printing and publishing center.  Because they were not using the center to capacity, executives questioned whether the center was necessary in the new building.   Many teams still needed to access printed documents for product documentation, corporate communications, payroll, invoices and marketing material, but the cost of printing everything centrally and shipping documents to the point of need was high and the process was not efficient.   Additionally, international business had grown, and printing needs expanded across the globe.

My team provided them a solution utilizing our network of Global Delivery Centers.  

By outsourcing printing and fulfillment operation to Xerox, the manufacturer could configure the new building without onsite printing and fulfillment, saving significant real estate costs.   Instead, this company uses multiple offsite locations to handle printing requirements closer to the point of need.  An easy-to-use Web portal lets team members order printed material regardless of where they work.   The material available for on-demand printing through the portal includes a wide variety of items from the latest product information and brochures, to training material and even business cards.  End users don’t really care where something is printed, as long as it shows up at the right location exactly when needed.    The results are great too.   We helped the client reduce overall print operation costs by 20% and eliminate the capital burden of hosting print and fulfillment operations on-site.

This is just one example of a business area (real estate and facilities) many companies may overlook as an opportunity for outsourcing. I would be curious to learn what other areas within your business would make for similar candidates.  Feel free to comment with your ideas.

- Todd Hawley, Managing Principal, Manufacturing Practice, Xerox Document Outsourcing

As a Principal Consultant for the Xerox Manufacturing practice, I help clients streamline their business processes, especially those involving documents. We recently reviewed a Fortune 100 company’s technical and marketing documents, and found many opportunities for the organization to improve processes and increase people’s access to current information – all while driving significant savings.

While the company reuses much of its content across maintenance, repair, training, and marketing specification documents, the re-use mostly happens via “copy and paste.” Authors store each document as a whole item rather than as logical content chunks, and the content authors literally open one document and copy what they needed over to the new document.

The minute a writer updates information in one document, all of the other documents sharing “that same information” are immediately out of date. This means that customer service people are not providing support based on the latest ECNs (Engineering Change Notices), and service teams aren’t sure if the documentation they have in hand actually matches the parts they are about to install. As a result, people place more calls than necessary to the support team, increasing wait times and costs unnecessarily.

To complicate matters further, the company uses multiple document repositories. Without a central repository for the content, employees distribute copies of product-related documentation to several places, again adding complexity and uncertainty for users. No one is really sure where to find information, and it is hard to keep track of what content needed to be updated where.

Fundamentally we saw two issues:

1. Storing information as documents vs. smaller content chunks that authors can reuse effectively.
2. Maintaining multiple copies of the same document, so that finding and updating information is needlessly complex.

However, this company is not alone in dealing with these types of challenges. Industry analysts identify these as challenges for many companies. Benchmarks indicate that:

• Employees waste 4.5 hours per person each week as a result of the inability to effectively share, update, and repurpose documents and related components (Document Management: Assessing Costs and Benefits; Strategic Planning, SPA-11-9200, D. Logan)
• Workers waste 9.6 hours a week searching for information (Paper-Less-Alliance)

That’s a lot of time – and time is money!! Xerox saved $650M during the past 15 years by improving its product documentation processes, storing information as content chunks for effective re-use, and creating distribution systems that drive accurate, relevant, current content to the point of need.

If you have experienced similar situations, I would welcome your comments and insights. In the meantime, I plan to continue to work with this organization during the coming months to help improve its processes. I’ll keep you apprised of our progress and learnings.

–Dave Vanable, Client Account Principal, Xerox Global Accounts Manufacturing Sector

Are you getting an efficiency boost from your product documentation? The consistent message I hear from manufacturing executives is the need to become more efficient, improve quality and reduce costs. But one of the areas they overlook is their technical and marketing product documentation. Typically they do not have a well thought out vision across the product documentation lifecycle from creation through fulfillment. Instead they have contracted out the individual steps in their process to multiple vendors on many different contracts, and they are not linked.

One example comes from a large industrial client we have been working with. They realized that their product documentation was not only costing them too much to produce, but it delayed their product launches and caused maintenance delays, since dealers didn’t always have the information they needed to make repairs. This documentation included technical specifications, product literature such as use and care manuals, marketing brochures used by their dealers, training manuals, etc. The manufacturer was working with many different third parties, there was no central repository of information, so very little could be reused, quality varied, information was often inaccurate, and often documentation was not completed on schedule.

When we got involved with them we started by painting the vision of the productivity and cost savings that could occur from managing the documentation linkages across the product documentation life cycle between technical authoring, translation and localization, production, and fulfillment. We then looked closely at the manufacturer’s current process and determined the most appropriate place to begin to get savings and quality improvements. Our flexibility in architecting a solution enabled us to start at one point while keeping an eye towards an end to end document solution. The quick opportunity for this manufacturer was consolidating their high resolution PDF files for technical and marketing literature into a centralized repository so the content was managed and could easily be accessed and repurposed, and then providing the production environment to print them on demand. The dealers were finally satisfied since they could get the documentation exactly when they needed it, it was up to date and always looked professional.

What has been very satisfying to me, is that after the initial implementation we have continued to expand opportunities for this client around the product documentation lifecycle vision. Through knowledge exchange workshops we identified solutions for other product documentation life cycle area’s to include: inventory control, order management, a customer service center, voice communications and corporate records, managed sourcing of print over the internet, new finishing options for more professional looking documents, and incremental high quality marketing literature. Not only has the quality of the documentation improved, but the client is saving $2.3 Million over 5 years, and we continue to pursue new opportunities together.

A lesson learned is that painting a differentiated and compelling vision of the product documentation lifecycle provides a roadmap for ongoing savings as the value chain expands. However equally important is finding a point to start with that will produce immediate savings and productivity around critical requirements.

If you have similar experiences I would love to hear about them.

- George Walton – VP Manufacturing Industry Major Account Operations

I didn’t expect to become an early adopter of the iPad, but when I got one as a birthday gift this past April, I was truly surprised how quickly I started using it.  Now, six months, later it is never far from my side, and this unexpected gift has definitely fed my “information” habit .  But what has really been interesting is how much I use it for business.  And I don’t think I’m unique.  In a recent client council event, 6 of the 18 participants used their iPads throughout the meeting.  One client said he had gone completely paperless and was using his iPad for everything. Those who use iPads seem to come to depend on them quickly.

The iPad is arguably one of the best tools for shopping – because it’s so easy and fast to browse through all the new catalog apps that are becoming available.  Yet, it strikes me that manufacturers and distributors should take advantage of the capability in the same way the retailers do. 

For example, look at electrical supplies.  There are many versions of wiring devices, switches, outlets, etc., and providers must support large catalogs and specification guides to cover all the options.  As the size of the catalog increases, cost to print, distribute, update, and simply use these documents increases exponentially.

A UK-based client of ours, MK Electric, faced this exact issue.   Their specification guide alone was over 800 pages long.  Working together, we designed an iPad app to handle this formidable catalog.   You can download it free from the app store  – just search for MK Electric (there is also a version for the iPhone).   Using the thumbnails, it is easy to navigate through the catalog, get to the part want, and then check for a distributor location.   (Note:  they only sell in the UK area – so don’t be surprised if the distance is a bit far if you live in the states.)  

MK Electric understands that everyone does not have an iPad, so they make their information available in multiple formats which includes a downloadable version of their specification guide, (available at http://www.mkelectric.co.uk/). For local clients and distributors who want a hard copy, they can use this site to order printed versions as well.

Flexibility with an eye to the future.   I think the iPad and manufacturer’s catalogs certainly provide an example of where the future in this industry is heading.

How about you?   What types of applications are you using- or planning to use — with iPads in manufacturing?  

- Bettina Engelmann, Manager, Manufacturing Industry Marketing, Xerox Corporation

As the world becomes more interconnected, the ability to market products and deliver services around the world becomes more critical to your success. As the VP of Xerox’s Creative & Technical Communications (CTC) organization, I see many clients looking to grow revenue by expanding their global customer base.

However, globalization brings a unique set of challenges, to manufacturers and service providers in particular, because these types of companies need to launch and sell products simultaneously in markets with different languages, cultures, and regulations. Good global communications require skillful translation and localization of all your customer-facing content from technical manuals to marketing collaterals to internal communications. How do you know if your translations sound natural to the reader? Or that your documents will get to the right users where and when they need them?

Double digit growth rates in the Language Service Provider (LSP) market show that translation and localization are key to reaching new customers in global markets. Yet the traditional approach to managing these activities – which often depends on serial translation and fragmented delivery – is hardly ever optimized. Treating translation as a separate step from the overall documentation development process frequently results in cost overruns, high error rates, and launch delays. It can even lead to compliance problems that may damage your firm’s brand image or reputation in new markets where you only have one chance to make a good first impression.

Working recently with several large, international product manufacturers, I’ve found there’s a better way to handle translation and localization. At Xerox, we can help you integrate documentation design and localization into a holistic, optimized process that includes everything from authoring and content management to document production and distribution, all while making some fairly significant improvements in quality, cost, compliance and speed.  A great example is the work we’ve done at Ducati.  I think you’ll enjoy this clip because it summarizes – quite simply and with a bit of humor – what we do for them.   Ducati Real Business Live Clip

While the situation in the Ducati commercial makes us chuckle, I know the challenges to translation and localization are no laughing matter. Let me know if you are facing any specific issues that I haven’t touched on here and I’d be happy to address those for you in a future post. 

–Thomas Hurysz, Vice President, Creative and Technical Communications

Outsourcing is a major trend in today’s industry, but document outsourcing isn’t typically top-of-mind when you raise this topic.   It has been interesting to work with many of our largest managed print centers directly, especially those that we service for our manufacturing clients.  Across dozens of examples, good communication is what I have seen ensure success most often.

Good customer account management is critical, particularly when we perform the primary services at a distance from the customer’s location.   It is important for the customer to feel they have a direct connection to the people within the organization that manages the technology and the processes that their internal organization had managed previously.

During the outsourcing process, we pay a lot of attention to the service level agreement (SLA) which defines our performance obligations in terms of timeliness, accuracy and quality.   However, it is not until the actual handoff to the new center that a customer may realize they can no longer to walk into the production area and gain insight easily into the status of a critical job or review the day’s production output.  If not managed well, this change to an offsite center can cause concern for the client.

The best way to avoid this situation is to make sure that the account management framework – guidelines, tools, and processes used to manage the account —  includes a “Trusted Advisor”, someone who acts as the client advocate inside the offsite facility.  Customers love to know that they have one hand to shake at any time, and that the person attached to that hand understands the processes required to get the work done on time and with the accuracy and quality required.

In the best situations, the Trusted Advisor follows a well-defined Communication Plan with the customer that includes Problem Management, Incident Management, and Request for Service processes.  We generally develop this plan collaboratively with the client at the onset of the relationship. The plan should include important steps like when a communication will occur, who will receive it, and the best channel (email, phone, etc.) to use when communicating with the customer. 

The Communication Plan should also detail our regular communication schedule.  Monthly or quarterly reviews help the customer and the servicing personnel keep tabs on performance, explore value added services, and plan for the future.  Regularly-scheduled communication also helps keep the conversation going and ensures a trusted relationship exists on both sides.   I regularly attend these sessions with my clients and service team to show that I care and that I want to be accountable for problem resolution and ongoing improvement.  For me, this time with clients is very valuable because it lets me hear the clients concerns – and satisfaction – personally. These meetings also give me insight into where we can provide more value in the future.

If you have any thoughts or suggestions about what makes customer communication effective, please feel free to comment here or drop me a note at patricia.calderon@xerox.com.

- Patricia Calderon, Vice President Customer Communications Delivery Operations

When manufacturers think about their supply chain they typically think about the parts, components, and raw materials needed to build a product.  Procurement manages these parts very closely, consolidates the number of suppliers, and looks for efficiency gains.  What gets overlooked, however, is the supply chain for the product documentation that includes brochures, user guides, warranty information, service manuals, and training materials.   These items are as critical to a successful product as any component or part because the product cannot be sold, used by the customer, or serviced without these items.

In my recent work with an international manufacturer, I saw how managing the document supply chain can present tremendous opportunity.

The manufacturer was looking for cost reduction.   They were spending millions of dollars on printed material supplied by many, diverse vendors across the globe.  There was no standard process to manage their printed material supply chain and to fulfill their printed material on a global basis.  Managing the process was difficult, and the satisfaction levels were low as material was often delivered late.

At this point the company called Xerox in to help them.   We developed a plan to consolidate how they source all their printing.   We brought in Xerox Document Advisors to manage the process, and worked out a plan to take advantage of our network of production print partners across the country.  In addition, we implemented a web portal they now use to order materials.   These orders come to Xerox directly where we source all the print requisitions and fulfill them according to customer requirements.   As a result, we can consolidate the jobs, route them to the closest and most cost effective venue to print them on demand, and deliver the final product to the point of need exactly when needed.

We help them make sure: 

• Brochures go to distributors, marketing groups, and other sales channels directly
• Product documentation goes to manufacturing, sales and customers
• Service and training information goes to service and maintenance channels

The bottom line is the manufacturer can focus on producing and selling products, while reducing total printing cost by at least 20%. Most importantly, all those key constituents now get their documents on time and in the shape they need, raising both satisfaction and productivity.

Do you have a similar experience? If so, please feel free to comment because I would love to hear your story.

 - Todd Hawley, Managing Principal, Manufacturing Practice, Xerox Document Outsourcing

Clearly getting products to market quickly has become even more important for manufacturers as competition continues to grow and there are ever more global players.  There are so many challenges today in streamlining the process.   Product engineers and designers must communicate with suppliers around the world, actual production may take place in multiple locations in various countries, regulations must be adhered to such as REACH for the European community, and then launches must be planned in multiple countries.   Launches require sales marketing and service to be involved, and in today’s world can require documentation in many different languages.   If all parts of this process are not met when needed – product introductions are delayed, which can cost companies millions of dollars and great opportunity in lost market share.

What are companies doing to improve this process?  Do PLM systems really manage all aspects of the product lifecycle-from design from its design and development to its ultimate disposal-including the product usage, marketing and service information?  In talking to several large manufacturers we are finding that not many of these companies have fully linked their document lifecycles to their product lifecycles.

One example is concurrent design – although this discussion has been around for a decade how soon are marketing and service people engaged and allowed to access the design knowledge?   Clients are telling us they have missed product launches because documentation is not available.

A colleague of mine, Rich Baily, wrote a very insightful white paper on “How documentation innovation can speed up your time to market.”

He suggests there are seven essential steps for process transformation:

1. Think like a change agent and break down the silos.
2. Analyze the process end-to-end with a disciplined methodology like Lean Six Sigma.
3. Build the foundation for content re-use.
4. Simplify global translation and localization.
5. Implement the latest technologies and best practices.
6. Employ disciplined, data-driven management to maximize efficiency and deliver measurable results.
7. Consider a comprehensive Business Process Outsourcing solution.

How is your company handling this?  Is your information still relegated to different silos – or are you one of the forward thinkers that have streamlined this process?   Please share your thoughts on this blog.

- Bettina Engelmann, Manager, Manufacturing Industry Marketing

I was reminded again of how critical product safety is while listening to the news this morning as another popular toy’s safety is being questioned.  Product recalls have become all too commonplace and it seems items are scrutinized even more closely with the visibility of the holiday shopping season.  Clearly this is a serious issue, since Manufacturers are often indirectly responsible for a consumer’s safety and even their life.   Recent recalls exist in almost all product categories – the most recently publicized have included cribs, toys, automobiles and food.  Besides the ethical responsibility to provide a safe product, a manufacturer’s reputation and brand integrity is also at risk, leading of course to an immediate decrease in sales and loss in marketshare, and often major litigation.

Product safety is also big part of our country’s trade relations.   For example an article from industry week stated that on “Oct. 26 China and the U.S. agreed to increase efforts to boost consumer safety …”A systematic improvement of practices in the supply and distribution chain will be the most effective means of enhancing product safety,” the agencies said in a joint statement. The watchdogs will focus on improving the safety of toys, all-terrain vehicles, electrical products, lighters and fireworks.”

Many sectors, including consumer products and food and beverage producers, are seriously addressing this, and are struggling with legislation that varies from state to state and country to country.   “Many experts believe development of industry standards may be a more effective measure for compliance.”  “The questions remain how to assess risk if manufacturers do not protect the public welfare, ….there is not a clear set of guidelines such as with Sarbanes-Oxley, so it is more difficult to prove liability,”  suggests George Goodall, senior research analyst for Ontario-based Info-Tech in an article published in Manufacturing Business Technology.     

I often wonder what happens within the manufacturer’s walls when they are faced with such an issue.   How many times are the manufacturers caught off guard, requiring a major staff effort to collect the information from the entire product’s lifecycle – from inception through design, sourcing, production and distribution?  Or in the case of some food products from “field to fork?”  Are all the materials and chemicals that are in the product or used in the production clearly documented with Material Safety Data Sheets that are readily available?  Can the manufacturer quickly pinpoint the source of the issue and come up with a remedy that will solve the problem and won’t cause a significant loss to their company?  And how much time and effort of the company’s personnel does this cause?

How many manufacturers have considered this critical portion of the product lifecycle, and have a work process to closely manage all this information?  I have to believe that smart companies are taking the initiative to manage this information closely, and not waiting for regulation to demand it.   Please let me know how your companies are dealing with this issue to insure the safety of us all.

- Bettina Engelmann, Manager, Manufacturing Industry Marketing