From the email:
Epson chose DocZone DITA, a SaaS-based XML component content management system designed for technical documentation teams, to move themselves from unstructured content to structured content for publication in multiple output types, author content at topic level instead of document level, store the content in a CMS for easy reuse and change tracking, and much more.
So nothing concrete in terms of ROI return was had, though publishing to multiple formats and content reuse may be a part of that for Epson. Clearly the results must be good otherwise there wouldn’t be this webinar… Still, getting actual numbers is always worthwhile, and the suggestion that this will be discussed is enough to pique my interest in this webinar.
Thankfully it is not set for the same time as the Hackos webinar presentation, starting an hour later at 2pm EST. For those not in that time zone here’s the breakdown:
- 12:00 PM Mountain
- 1:00 PM Central
…and well after normal working hours in Europe.
Keith,
ROI for the CMS at Epson America has not been measured specifically in the amount of money saved because our primary goal is keeping up with a growing workload and accelerated schedules without increasing our costs at the same rate. What we needed was a way to become more efficient with our current staff time instead of becoming a bigger department. We have essentially saved man hours we would have had to accrue, which is hard to measure precisely. To us, measuring productivity based on the number projects completed in a given timespan and the efficient use of the mechanisms that get us there is more useful than measuring other things, such as how many topics each writer creates and how much that costs. If you indeed get the metrics you measure, we selected metrics that help us achieve our goals. By the way, we do publish to multiple formats from our single-sourced content, but it was hard to include all the aspects of our implementation in one webinar. We focused on the aspects that are getting the ROI we are striving for.
Thank you for the comment Nancy! It was a good webinar and the point you made above was what you put across. Everybody has their own purposes and fundamental goals when they put an ROI together, and however it is measured it is always good to see other people put an ROI into practice, and to see the results!
Cheers!
I am finding DocZone really hard to use. When you “bookmark” a link you never know if you are getting the right document or some dead end that links to some old version. Graphics have to be loaded as zip files, downloading source files for graphics is exceedingly time consuming.
Search capabilities are pathetic. Try to find datasheet by part # – it’s hopeless, so I have to browse the entire company file structure to find my parts.
Our old in house system was far more user friendly. I’m a lot less productive in DocZone. I learned our old system in 1/2 hour, DocZone is taking days and some things just don’t work.
I’m just looking for quick and simple check in / check out, quick PDF rendering and convenient graphics check in/ check out. Is it really necessary to zip everything??? Why can’t I download all the source files for a document in one operation?
No retribution here, and thanks for the frank and honest posting about your thoughts on DocZone.
I haven’t used it myself but I suspect the zipping of files–instead of just outputting a PDF–is because for some output types, like anything HTML-based, there are a lot of files and it makes sense to zip them together in order to keep them together in a defined file/directory structure. The other features I can’t comment on. Best of luck though!