Case Study
- Case Study
- Life Fitness
Life Fitness - From Struggle to Success Story, From over budget & overdue to company front runners
About Life Fitness
Life Fitness strives to inspire healthier lives through solutions for every facility and exerciser.
The Challenge
In recent years, the fitness equipment industry has undergone huge technological advancements. Products are no longer just hardware but include sophisticated software to collect and report data and integrate with a variety of apps.
For 45 years. LifeFitness has been one of the leading manufacturers of cardio and strength products. LifeFitness offers more than 160 products, which are sold in more than 90 countries, and employs 3,000 workers worldwide.
For years, the technical documentation team at LifeFitness had been using tools like InDesign and have been able to meet deadlines. However, as the product lines grew and became more complex, it became more and more challenging to produce and manage the documentation, add new languages, meet deadlines, and stay within budget. Two of the senior technical writers Bob and Judy began to search for a better way on behalf of the Team.
“The technical documentation team at LifeFitness was struggling to meet deadlines and find more money in the budget.
Using DITA and an established process, the team was able to transform themselves into a department that not only could meet deadlines and demonstrate cost savings, but also rapidly adapt to an expanding product line and lead the way for other departments in the midst of corporate change.“
The Solution
LifeFitness used the following methodology:
- Research
- Bob and Judy learned that many technical publications departments struggle with the same issues. They read about DITA but were still uncertain how it could work for them.
- Bob and Judy attended a CIDM DITA North America Conference. Where they sat in sessions and talked to vendors about tools and services, and they came away with a solution.
- Buy-in
- Next, Bob and Judy had to sell the solution to LifeFitness executives. Bob and Judy gave the project a name and created a presentation for the board.
- Though it was a daunting task to persuade the board to invest, the board was aware of the technical documentation team’s struggles.
- Bob and Judy’s presentation highlighted the benefits of DITA, savings in time and translation costs, increase in consistency and efficiency with content reuse, flexibility in output, and more.
- Design & Planning
- with the support of LifeFitness, Bob, and Judy engaged Data Conversion Laboratories (DCL).
- DCL reviewed their content, made recommendations, and converted the InDesign files to DITA XML. In cleaning up the converted content, Bob and Judy learned more about DITA and their new tools and how they had underestimated the amount of reuse they could achieve!
- Baseline Implementation
- LifeFitness decided on the XDocs DITA CCMS from Bluestream, and this phase involved setting up the CCMS environment and publishing stylesheets, training, and testing.
- Deployment
- After a year of preparation, they were ready to start editing and creating content in the new CCMS.
The Result
For the team — Bob describes using the new tools and methods like the scene in the Wizard of Oz movie, “where everything went from black and white to color”.
The technical documentation team now produces and manages content with relative ease. Adding a new product line with DITA and the XDocs CCMS now takes two weeks instead of eight.
For translations — it used to take two weeks just to prepare the package files for the translation vendor, but now it takes less than two hours. Since the initial deployment, LifeFitness has added three languages and 58 new products. Additionally, they now translate to 11 languages, and will be adding more.
For customers — LifeFitness used to live in a PDF-only world, but with DITA and XDocs DITA CCMS it’s as easy to output DITA content to HTML as PDF. Customers can view manuals online and customer service technicians can now view all the content they need on their smartphones or tablets. The topics are up today and easy to find.
For the company — customer service manuals, error codes, schematics, and troubleshooting are all available online. Topics can be accessed through Salesforce. LifeFitness creates links to topics in the Salesforce articles, and these articles are also emailed to technicians or attached to cases.
More — In addition to large increases in efficiency for the technical documentation team, customers, and company, the technical documentation department at LifeFitness was able to transfer its success to other departments in the company.
Software engineering is now also using DITA and storing their content in the XDocs DITA CCMS and everything maps perfectly.
Also, The LifeFitness team has been able to mentor other documentation teams in the Life Fitness, family, and all are now enjoying the new efficiencies in producing and translating technical documentation.
The Result
The technical documentation team at LifeFitness International estimates that they saved about $30,000 in their first year of using DITA and XDocs DITA CCMS by eliminating the $4.00 per page desktop publishing costs.
An earlier project was done with InDesign at a higher cost and they estimate that with DITA they would have saved $12,000 on that project.
A recent project had budgeted $15,000 to translate documents into two languages – $7,500/language. This was based on previous desktop publishing estimates. With DITA and the XDocs CCMS, they were able to deliver 11 languages for a total cost of $3,500 – $320/language – and completed the task in 10 days.
A recent project had budgeted $15,000 to translate documents into two languages. This was based on previous desktop publishing estimates. With DITA and the XDocs CCMS, they were able to deliver 11 languages for a total cost of $3,500 – $320/language – and completed the task in 10 days.
Life Fitness
In Brief
Challenge
- Using their existing tools, it was difficult to produce documentation, meet deadlines, and stay within budget.
- Localization costs, demands, and schedule pressures were growing quickly.
Results
The XDocs DITA CCMS solution…
- Eliminated desktop publishing costs
- Saved an estimated $12,000 per project by using the more efficient XDocs tool chain
- Reduced localization costs for one document set from $7,500/language to $320/language
- Enabled the team to stay on schedule and plan moving forward
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.
