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A faster way to serve HR.

The Xerox Services Human Resources (HR) group needed a better way to manage Summary Plan Descriptions (SPDs)—essential HR documents which were cumbersome and costly to author and maintain. Xerox Services Content Development and Language Services (CDLS) group implemented the XDocs DITA CCMS (Component Content Management System) to meet HR’s documentation challenges and provide added benefits to both Xerox Services groups.

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Xerox is now the world’s leading enterprise for business process and document management, offering global services from claims reimbursement and automated toll transaction to customer care centers and HR benefits management. The new Xerox is dedicated to innovation, service and giving their customers the freedom to focus on business.

The Xerox Services HR group provides HR consulting and HR solutions to organizations. Their HR services include providing Enrollment Guides and Summary Plan Descriptions (SPDs). 

HR must create SPD publications for employee benefits in order to comply with government regulations. Each year, benefits information must be reviewed and the content updated to reflect any changes from the previous year, or the company could be out of compliance and face stiff penalties such as fines. In addition, employees need the SPDs to know what benefits they are entitled to.

These documents are typically large, and an organization could have as many as 200 separate SPDs. HR often did not have the staff to keep the publications updated. It took many hours for HR benefits personnel to create, manage, and format these documents in a non-structured environment like Microsoft Word. Reusable content such as government-required standard language was copied and pasted between documents and then maintained in multiple places. In addition, only one user could modify the document at a time. The difficulty of maintaining the essential benefits documentation was an obstacle to the essential work of providing service to customers.

The Xerox CDLS group, which provides information architecture, authoring, content management, and solution architecture for organizations, has been managing and reusing content in the XDocs DITA CCMS for years. HR approached CDLS to discuss their internal solution and what it could do for HR and their content. 

CDLS determined that although the Human Resources market is “new” to DITA, the XDocs DITA CCMS provides an intelligent solution for the core challenges of Xerox Services HR:

• A large amount of content that is reused amongst documents
• Publishing to various formats such as PDF, HTML, Mobile output, and more.
• Content that varies based on the audience
• Content that requires frequent reviews and updates
• Multiple content collaborators working on various sections of documents
• The need to spend more time on important work and less time formatting content and editing identical content

The XDocs DITA CCMS would save HR time and money while providing more flexibility than their current tools and practices. Xerox Services HR group would have their own XDocs DITA CCMS installed in-house. CDLS would provide content conversion and training for the HR authors around structured authoring, DITA, and the XDocs DITA CCMS.

For the Xerox Services HR group, the XDocs DITA CCMS implementation has been a huge success. HR found that the XDocs DITA CCMS delivered compelling Return on Investment (ROI) in the following areas:

• Content reuse: HR can easily capture shared content in reuse templates, which enables them to create and update SPDs quickly by changing content in one spot and having it update everywhere it is used.
• Collaborative authoring: Multiple authors can work on various pieces of the publications at the same time to further increase author efficiency.
• Faster, modular SME review: Review processes are faster and happen earlier. Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) can now review sections of the publications as DITA topics and approve them individually.

• Content publications: Content can easily be delivered in different formats such as PDF and HTML and more.
• Last minute updates: The reuse model allows last minute updates to be easily incorporated into many publications at once.
• Better document workflow: The XDocs DITA CCMS workflow features provide efficiency for initiating, tracking, and finishing review processes.

For the Xerox Services HR group, the XDocs DITA CCMS solution reduces authoring time, reduces SME review time, enables a large amount of content reuse, and increases the speed with which new variant publications can be created.

After a few months with the system, the Xerox Services HR group wondered how they did it before.
Moreover, Xerox Services HR are able to market this solution to their clients as a new offering and a differentiator with their competitors.