Enterprise Technical Documentation: Save Time & Cut Costs

In an effort to figure out why adequate products were being rejected, the manufacturer launched an internal investigation. The result of the investigation revealed that there were inconsistencies between the company’s Engineering and Quality Assurance (QA) documents. The original technical writing firm hired by the company failed to notice that the requirements in the Engineering documentation did not align with those in the QA documents. Because of these differences, the QA team was judging products on different standards than those used by the Engineering team. The investigation also found that finding and re-testing these rejected components consumed 25% of the company’s product testing capacity and 15% of its engineering capacity. These quality issues posed a huge loss of efficiency and resources to the manufacturer.

Essential Data’s team of writers was able to formulate a solution to this firm’s woes. A team of EDC’s technical writers worked directly with members of the client’s supply chain to evaluate each company’s Acceptance and Quality specifications. Using the manufacturer’s engineering specifications as source documentation, the technical writing team rewrote multiple Quality and Acceptance Test Procedures (QTP/ATP) documents to make them consistent with the Engineering documentation. Another useful feature added by the technical writing team was the implementation of a Document Management System. This system allowed Essential Data’s technical writers to link each new document to the Engineering specification documents, automatically triggering updates to all documents if one were updated.

The results of standardizing the Engineering specifications with Quality and Acceptance criteria resulted in a massive improvement in efficiency for the enterprise manufacturer. The firm saw a 98% reduction of false negatives during testing, lightening the engineers’ workload and allowing greater investment of resources into product development and improvement. The technical writer’s efforts also led to the manufacturer achieving cost and labor savings related to handling, storing, and re-testing previously rejected – but acceptable – products.