In today’’s global business environment companies must continuously improve their ability to quickly and cost-efficiently develop new products, tailor them for an increasingly segmented customer base, and support them globally over the entire product lifecycle. Advances in ERP, CRM, and PLM systems have added pressure on technical publications departments to deliver information that is tailored for individual customers or specific products and configurations. Additionally, this information has to be delivered faster, in multiple formats and media, and at a lower cost. XML provides an excellent path to automating the publishing process and achieving a leap forward in an organization’s ability to produce and maintain volumes of high quality, tailored information at a fraction or the typical costs. Until recently, however, XML came with high start up costs which limited adoption.

New standards such as DITA enforce best practices and enable reuse of information and interoperability of publishing systems. Today, many organizations are adopting DITA because they are simply looking for faster implementation; they deploy the DITA open source toolkit with little to no specialization. These organizations are simply looking for an out-of-the-box solution that automates their publishing process with minimal implementation effort. As the technology matures, we will see an increasing number of new solutions, built on DITA, that take this idea one step further and leverage this excellent infrastructure technology to develop production-quality turn key applications for various publishing processes. You can expect out-of-the-box applications that automate the process of creating high-quality, interactive service manuals, illustrated parts catalogs, operator’s manuals, and many other commonly used technical publications. Your ability to embrace and adopt these new applications will enable you to significantly improve the capacity and efficiency of your organization and allow your company to capitalize on the quality of its product support through lasting business differentiation.

PTC has already delivered the first of these integrated, out-of-the box applications. Built on Arbortext dynamic publishing software, this DITA-based solution enables customers to publish high-quality service manuals with embedded interactive illustrations quickly with minimal configuration. The PTC service manual application offers a comprehensive set of capabilities including text and illustration authoring, automatic publishing, and advanced content management. It incorporates industry best practices and enables you to both repurpose product design information and link your service manuals to actual product configurations, thus eliminating costs and allowing you to standardize your service procedures. And all this is packaged in one simple, integrated application that allows you to get started at a fraction of the typical costs and time.

Attend this session to learn more about the PTC service manual application and how you can broaden your skills to fully leverage the power of other similar new solutions.