Making work safer, easier for customers.
Ariel shares technical assets with customers through a new digital experience from Adobe.
67%
Fewer steps needed to manage translations using automation
Objectives
Help customers quickly find the technical information they need
Reduce manual steps to get updated content in front of customers faster and with less effort
Bring technical and marketing information together on a single platform to deliver consistent customer experiences
Results
Automatically generate new or updated content as HTML and PDF in less than 30 minutes, compared to a week previously
67% fewer steps needed to manage translations by using automated connectors
31% reduction in linguist translations and 100% improvement in machine translation quality by relying on reusable structured content
Deliver consistent content by reuse topics across technical documentation and updated in one location
Ariel Corporation is the largest manufacturer of separable reciprocating gas compressors — a component vital to the extraction, processing, storage and transport of natural gas around the world. But according to Ronald Egle, Content Systems Administrator at Ariel, one of the company’s greatest assets and services is its clear technical documentation.
“Our compressors are used as a part of processing natural gas, which means they are used in inherently dangerous environments,” says Egle. “By providing the most accurate and easy-to-understand technical information possible, we not only make our customers’ jobs easier, but also safer. And we take that responsibility seriously.”
The Ariel website serves as a hub where customers can learn about compressors, order parts and find support and training. But unlike the typical corporate website, the majority of visitors to the Ariel portals are distributors, vendors, end-users and others looking for highly technical information. They want to quickly access manuals and find technical documents that help them package, commission, operate and maintain Ariel compressors safely and effectively. When the time came to replace the existing website content management system (CMS), Ariel looked for an option that would deliver strong support for technical documentation.
After evaluating five leading CMS options, Ariel chose Adobe Experience Manager as the backbone for its website due to its integrated functionality that allows Ariel to create and deliver content faster. Experience Manager Guides underpins the technical documentation efforts by serving as a component content management system (CCMS) with native support for DITA content. It works seamlessly with Experience Manager Sites, a powerful and easy-to-use CMS, to publish content to the website. Experience Manager Assets adds digital asset management capabilities.
“Experience Manager was the only platform we found that allows us to publish DITA documents directly to the website,” says Egle. “With Experience Manager Guides, we can push out accurate technical information faster — which benefits both us and our customers.”
“With Experience Manager Guides, we can update topics more easily and frequently to help make sure that customers are always up to date on even the most minor changes to our documentation.”
Ronald Egle
Content Systems Administrator, Ariel Corporation
Automating HTML and PDF generation
The technical documentation team supports roughly 20 solutions with multiple types of technical documentation, including product manuals, customer bulletins, product information, ISO documentation, packager standards and application manuals. The Adobe CCMS now serves as a single source of truth for all technical information. Technical writers author information as DITA content. The topics can be reuse across multiple documents, keeping installation instructions, safety statements and other content standard across documents. Taking advantage of reusable topics saves time spent duplicating work and when it is time to make content updates, writers only need to make the changes once.
New and updated content is automatically published to the website through Experience Manager Sites by pulling the structured content into standardised templates to generate pages quickly. This eliminates the time spent manually converting files and loading them into the CMS. Content is also published in PDF using Adobe FrameMaker Publishing Server, with completed files uploaded to Experience Manager Assets.
“Working with Experience Manager, we’ve completely automated the publication process,” says Egle. “New or updated web pages and PDF files are typically generated within 30 minutes — a complicated process that could take up to a week before. With Experience Manager Guides, we can update topics more easily and frequently to help make sure that customers are always up to date on even the most minor changes to our technical documentation.”
“Our translation process used to take 21 steps, many of them manual, but now it’s closer to seven with Experience Manager Guides.”
Ronald Egle
Content Systems Administrator, Ariel Corporation
Reducing translation time and effort
Working with Adobe, Ariel can now set up more complicated automated workflows to handle reviews and approvals. This gives teams throughout the company more oversight so that they can be more responsible for their content.
Most importantly, the Adobe CCMS dramatically streamlines translation of documentation, with a framework to create projects and files for multilingual content that keeps it synchronised and organised. A connector interfaces with Ariel’s translation management system, XTM Cloud. Content is automatically sent to XTM Cloud for translation using an AI-enhanced TM that combines cutting-edge Translation Memory (TM) and SYSTRAN Neural Machine Translation (NMT) functionality to reduce the amount of time and effort humans need to spend translating and reviewing their content.
“Our translation process used to take 21 steps, many of them manual, but now it’s closer to seven with Experience Manager Guides,” says Egle. “With the improved translation processes in place, we’ve reduced our linguist translation efforts by 31% and improved the quality of our machine translation by over 100%. We also had a 100% reduction in manual file copying between systems.”
Responding faster to customers
With all technical, marketing, distributor and supplier information migrated over to Experience Manager, the next steps for Ariel involve improving accessibility. Adding advanced search functionality, for example, will help customers find the information that they need to answer their questions even faster.
“Experience Manager helps us to publish faster and be more responsive than ever,” says Egle. “We’re setting ourselves up to create website that will answer all our customers’ technical needs quickly and accurately.”
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