Manufacturers–whether you produce high tech equipment, farm machinery or everything in between–face a plethora of content-delivery challenges. How can you ensure the appropriate content reaches the right user? How does your content match with your product channel distribution? Are you sure you’re delivering appropriate content across geographical and language boundaries? And what about increasingly complex products with multiple versions that run on various operating systems, extensive configuration customizations and integration with third-party hardware and software? In fact for a single product, you may have to create custom documents for customers, consultants, trainers, contact centers and so on, and deliver each one in different formats.

The information contained in those custom documents is typically spread across multiple repositories: document management, CRM, product lifecycle management and a host of other systems. To bring all of this high-value, highly complex content together so they can deliver context-specific information to all of those audiences, manufacturers are turning to Mark Logic. With Mark Logic’s content assembly and content delivery solutions, you can easily integrate content from all of your systems, match content to configuration, publish custom documents that contain information from multiple sources, and deliver it in the format and on the device that your end-users require.

Technical Publications

Customers, consultants and training groups need much of the same information, but put into the context of their role and the tasks they need to perform. In the case of a data storage system, end users need to know how to operate the system, while IT staff need to know how to maintain it. Similarly trainers need to know what to include in courseware. This means they all need to know how internal and external consults installed and configured the system’s hardware and software.

With Mark Logic, you can integrate all of the content these diverse groups need—including technical information authored and published using the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) standard—and take advantage of both the content’s text and XML structure to dynamically assemble custom operating procedures, maintenance manuals and training tools that are role- and task-specific. Each document can then be delivered to their target audiences on multiple platforms and devices. This content reuse increases your speed to market, while lowering your costs dramatically.

Support and Services

Many of the challenges manufacturers face in delivering content to customers are also felt in their contact centers. In order to diagnose and fix problems, service representatives must be able to identify a range of details such as which product, version, configuration and platform the person is calling about. The rep must then be able to retrieve information specific to that product from support contentbases and case management systems, along with the custom documentation that was delivered to the customer.

By integrating all this content with Mark Logic, you can quickly develop content assembly and content delivery solutions that improve service delivery and lower costs. Instead of returning pages of links to entire documents or web pages, MarkLogic Server provides service representatives with the precise, context-sensitive information they need. This leads directly to higher first call resolution rates, fewer escalations and more satisfied customers.