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Improve Content Quality with One Process Change

Kathleen RuggeriRockwell Automation, Inc.Manager, Information Architecture

and Content Strategy

Lisa Adair Rockwell Automation, Inc.Content Quality Lead

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What We’ll Cover Today

• Issues We Needed to Solve

• Process Change We Instituted

• How We Went About It

• Results We’ve Seen

• Can it Work for You?

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Rockwell Automation at a Glance

AUTOMATION SOLUTIONS

80+COUNTRIES

22,000$5.9B

Innovation

Domain expertise

Culture of integrity and corporate responsibility

SERVINGCUSTOMERS FOR

113 YRS

FISCAL 2016 SALES

WORLD’S LARGEST COMPANY DEDICATED TO INDUSTRIAL AUTOMATION AND INFORMATION

EMPLOYEES

for a broad rangeof industries

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Issues We Were Facing

• Limited editing resources

• Multiple style guides to know/maintain

• Levels-of-edit (full, medium, light) helped

• Could not edit all teams’ work

• Clunky editing process (commented PDF files)

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Issues We Were Facing (Continued)

• No (good) dedicated source of terms

• Trademarks - look up cumbersome, enforcement difficult

• No easy way to track or measure quality

Consistent terms

Streamlined process

Good grammar and style

Improving in all of these areas would also positively impact translations

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Process Change: Implementing Machine Editing

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What is Machine Editing?

• Software analyzes content for:

• Style

• Readability

• Terminology

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

• Tone/Voice

• It’s a tool:

• Can do only what it is programmed to do

• Cannot understand your content

• Not perfect

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Manual versus Machine Editing

Manual Editing Machine Editing

Limited primarily by time- Work measured in hours

Limited by processing capability- Work measured in seconds

Cannot increase scope/authors without adding extra hours (headcount limitations)

One-time cost to increase processing power or add licenses with limited scope- Everyone with a license can be edited

Execute one-by-one with reliance on human editor Execute whenever author wants – beginning, middle, and/or end of project

Slight variations in execution (human nature) Same rule checked the same way for every user, every time

Evaluate and report manually Automated analytics

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Machine Editing Benefits

• Improve quality of source content

• Complex grammar and detailed style issues are corrected upstream, early in the writing process

• Authors can concentrate on their content

• ‘Heavy lifting’ of editing done by the tool

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Machine Editing Options

• Some options:

• ProWritingAid, StyleWriter®, WhiteSmoke®, Grammarly®, Acrolinx®

• We chose Acrolinx

• Natural language processing engine that guides authors as they create content

Trademarks are property of their respective companies.

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Where Can Acrolinx Help?

• Consistency for better customer experience

• Style – embeds institutional knowledge

• Grammar – reduces complex sentences

• Terminology – enforces correct term, provides usage guidance

• Translation-ready due to cleaner source content

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Checking Your Content

Run Acrolinx checks from Review ribbon

Acrolinx lists flags in a sidebar, similar to how Microsoft Word displays review comments

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How We Tested Machine Editing

• 6-month pilot with out-of-the-box configuration

• 8 authors tested the tool

• Feedback overwhelmingly positive!

• Business case to management was easy

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How We Implemented Machine Editing

• Consultants helped us train and load terminology

• Controlled roll-outs – one group at a time, by campus

• Turned pilot testers into super users to help support authors

• Happy adoption – not by force

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What Can You Customize?

• We have 117 grammar and style rules

• 88 out-of-the-box

• 10 customized for Rockwell Automation

• 19 created new for Rockwell Automation

• Create difference rulesets for different groups of authors

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Terminology is Now Formalized

• Centralized termbase

• 1100 English terms; 81,000 multilingual terms

• Use Acrolinx to support authors (use this term/not that term)

• Multilingual terminology is a related, but separate, function

• Up-front decisions on which terms to manage

• Trademarks are key – updates from Legal happen real time

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Results after Implementing Machine Editing

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Results/What We’ve Seen

• Tighter control/consistency in terminology/Trademarks

• More readable content

• 4x more authors have editing support

• Non-native speakers who write in English get immediate support

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Content Quality Improving Translations

• High-quality content is faster to translate and validate

• Quality is built into the source once

• Engage with translation team, vendors, and validators

• Build a process to improve translatability continuously and systematically with tweaks to the tool

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Is Machine Editing for You?

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Machine Editing Considerations

• Style guide complexity

• Cost

• Per-user licensing scheme, plus hosting server

• Consultant fees for configuration and ongoing support

• Resources to manage the tool and support users

• Short-term impact to productivity, translation memory

• Quality check still needed for issues the tool cannot find

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What’s in it for You as an Author?

• Makes you an even better author

• Frees you to learn the product you’re documenting

• Gets new authors up to speed faster

• Use whenever you need it

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Thank You!