case study

A heavy-equipment manufacturer, Crown Equipment, managed tens of thousands of pages of  content, mainly for print. However, as the physical products became a delivery mechanism for content through onboard touchscreen displays, global expansion continued, and time to market decreased, teams could not keep up with production. Digital transformation was needed.

The audience for Crown’s content was evolving rapidly. For example, instead of printed manuals, service technicians began to use tablets to access 1,200-page service manuals in large static PDF files. Searching the manuals was inefficient; the diagrams were two-dimensional, and the experience was falling behind that of similar industries. 

Content from service manuals overlapped – and sometimes conflicted with – content developed for training, service support, and operator manuals. In addition, the content was often copied from one product manual into another but not reused in a way that kept both in sync as updates were made.

Finally, translation for global expansion was becoming increasingly slow and incredibly costly.

I developed, socialized, and led the implementation of a global content and localization strategy. While I was a one-person show for the project’s first year, gathering input from consultants and as many stakeholders as possible, I built a rock-star team to see the project through.

This multi-year project had significant impacts:

• Averaged $1.25M in annual translation savings by establishing centralized processes, strategic third-party partnerships, and optimized end-to-end content development practices.
• Increased in-country support by strategically adding languages to the company portfolio and product displays to support 88 countries with up to 40 languages.
• Allowed content sharing and reuse to support multi-channel publication across products and departments (user design, technical communications, training, knowledge management, customer service, and engineering). 
• Realized full return on digital content transformation investment (ROI) of $1.9M to executive leadership within 18 months of content and localization strategy implementation and two years ahead of plan.

This initiative spanned multiple years from conception to maturity. I’m sure it continues to evolve today. Project stages required different processes, but a significant change was the addition of content requirements and milestones to the overall engineering-led product development process. This ensured content finally had a “seat at the table” at the right time.