About Ricoh North America
RICOH North America provides digital business services and printing solutions. The global parent company serves many industries such as Digital Services, Digital Products, Graphic Communications, and Industrial Solutions in around 200 countries and regions.
In Summary
Challenges
- Simple authoring tasks were cumbersome and complex. Some requiring 17 separate clicks.
- Publishing processes were painfully timeconsuming. It took 6 weeks to publish 1 product in 7 languages.
- Translation processes were slow and errorprone. Writers had to manually identify changed content.
Results
The XDocs DITA CCMS solution for Ricoh resulted in:
- The migration of over half a million files was completed in less than 60 days.
- A significant reduction in time spent on routine tasks, saving an estimated $1.7 million over five years.
- The publishing time for a flagship product was drastically reduced from six weeks to virtually instantaneous.
The Challenges
Ricoh North America used PTC Windchill for hardware product lifecycle management. As part of this ecosystem, the Ricoh Commercial Print and Graphic Communications business unit had been authoring DITA XML content using Windchill’s content management capabilities and embedded authoring tool, Arbortext, for over a decade.
The team had a vast library of content – over half a million DITA topics – that was locked into an aging, unwieldy system with poor usability and limited functionality.
With cumbersome, complex procedures to accomplish simple things, the productivity hit every day across a team of 20 writers, many publications, and many languages was huge, costing Ricoh thousands of dollars and making it very challenging to provide quality documentation on schedule.
Bluestream’s support team is phenomenal! In my 24 years in this business, working for IBM and Ricoh, I’ve never experienced a support team this responsive, personable, and laser-focused on solutions in such a timely manner
If you’re looking to simplify and streamline content development and management, the XDocs suite is hard to beat.
Bill Duncan, Principal
Solutions Architect
Development Tools and
Infrastructure Engineering
Ricoh North America
Authoring Woes
Using Windchill presented many problems. The system was designed not as a Component Content Management System for authoring technical documents but as a documentation add-on to Windchill with basic functionality focused on hardware assemblies and CAD documents. Windchill was ill suited to managing XML files – simple tasks like locating and checking out DITA files required a writer to make up to 17 separate clicks, multiple times every day.
Publishing Problems
Publishing from Windchill was a nightmare. In the old system, publishing for a single flagship software
product, Ricoh ProcessDirector, used to take six weeks for only seven languages. This was laborintensive, mind-numbing work.
Translation Challenges
The Solution
The Ricoh Commercial Print and Graphic Communications unit needed a modern DITA Component Content Management System (CCMS) with a fully integrated, world class editing environment. Ricoh needed a robust, scalable system. With a sophisticated, hands-on implementation team, they also needed the system to be open, accessible, and easy to configure, with excellent guidance and support for a fast, aggressive rollout. On a tight budget, they also needed a vendor that was prepared to work with them to find an affordable solution.
After careful review of all the options on the market, the Ricoh team chose Bluestream’s XDocs DITA CCMS. With XDocs, the Ricoh authoring team attained the crucial capabilities they needed. The XDocs DITA CCMS enables the writers to:
- Simplify and streamline everyday tasks such as editing content with an intuitive, fully featured authoring environment.
- Access sophisticated file references, where used , link management, and reporting capabilities so that writers could easily identify all topics and graphics that were part of a publication, as well as all the locations where any file was used.
- Branch/merge content for release management.
- Leverage the powerful XDocs Localization Module for translations
- Make use of a substantive, open API for automation and integration with other systems including their third party content delivery platform.
- Send subscription-based notifications for events, such as when a file is changed.
- Work in a DITA authoring and content management environment built from the ground up with simplicity for authoring and usability in mind.
Writers can easily open and edit content in the intuitive, best-in-class Oxygen Author, which is fully integrated with XDocs DITA CCMS.
Writers can send the right files to translation effortlessly with the XDocs Localization module, which allows you to identify changed files, automates transfer to and from LSPs, seamlessly exports and imports content, and synchronizes localization files with the source version. In addition, writers can continue work on content in the source language after sending content for localization.
Using XDocs’ open API, Bill Duncan, Ricoh’s Principal Solutions Architect for this project, was able to create Sync Commander, software that leverages XDocs’ advanced search capabilities and export API to provide atomic exports of production-level product libraries. The tool then uploads the documents directly to Ricoh’s online platform, Titania Delivery. With XDocs DITA CCMS, the time to publish Ricoh ProcessDirector has gone from seven grueling weeks to no publishing at all!
The Results
With the XDocs DITA CCMS, Ricoh was able to quickly attain all its key goals.
By calculating the time taken to accomplish routine tasks, Ricoh was able to demonstrate that for a typical action, XDocs saved about 20 seconds of a writer’s time. The Ricoh team performed a detailed calculation based on the number of such tasks the
writing team performs every day, all year. By the most conservative estimates, the efficiency gains and process improvements from moving to XDocs DITA CCMS will save Ricoh at least $1.7 Million over five years. The real number may be much higher.
Key to Ricoh’s success was the outstanding training and technical support provided by the Bluestream team to help navigate a complex document migration and implementation process. Bill Duncan states it best:
The investment in XDocs has yielded huge dividends
for Ricoh, after migrating half-a-million files out of
Windchill and into XDocs. The entire implementation
was completed in less than 60 days, aligning with
product-release schedules. The resulting time-savings
can be measured in person-weeks of time annually.
The integrated tools suite combining authoring,
review, CCMS, publishing, and translation management, was designed specifically for XML, which is extremely important. There was no forcing poorly matched software meant for other purposes into this suite. It was clearly purpose-built. The authoring team was thrilled to save several-hundred thousand clicks per author per year, compared to Windchill.
Bill Duncun
Principal Solutions Architect
Development Tools and Infrastructure Engineering
Ricoh North America
In Summary
Challenges
- Simple authoring tasks were cumbersome and complex. Some requiring 17 separate clicks.
- Publishing processes were painfully timeconsuming. It took 6 weeks to publish 1 product in 7 languages.
- Translation processes were slow and errorprone. Writers had to manually identify changed content.
Results
The XDocs DITA CCMS solution for Ricoh resulted in:
- The migration of over half a million files was completed in less than 60 days.
- A significant reduction in time spent on routine tasks, saving an estimated $1.7 million over five years.
- The publishing time for a flagship product was drastically reduced from six weeks to virtually instantaneous.
Realize the potential of your content
The XDocs DITA CCMS, the XDelivery Documentation Portal, and the Manufacturing Suite add value by streamlining documentation processes, creating efficiencies, improving content quality, and enhancing customer experience.
