We’ve grown a lot over time,

both in terms of number of machines and technical complexity. Ours is a configurable and increasingly personalized product. MG2 produces automatic machines for the pharmaceutical industry: a highly regulated sector in which the technical documentation must be carried out with particular rigor and precision.

The order of magnitude is onerous: the manuals provided for each machine can reach 1500 total pages. And this “only” for the instruction manual, to which it is necessary to add other documentation such as validation procedures, etc.

The activity carried out by the Technical Documentation Department was recognized by our customers as quality, but the production of the documentation was basically “handcrafted”. We were therefore very effective but inefficient. For the editorial staff used Word with specific models and macros to simplify the layout. Documentation production was also supported by specific tools. Translation management was manual. The professionalism and competence of colleagues made it possible to produce high quality technical documents, but at the cost of mainly manual operations. From an analysis it emerged that the hours spent in non-value added activities were many: this prompted us to analyze alternative solutions for the document workflow.

We carried out a software selection that led to EKR: convinced us not only about the presence on the territory but also the willingness to work alongside us in the analysis and to customize their CMS according to our needs, as was necessary. EKR gave us a lot of support: it didn’t just sell the software and that’s it, but it immediately supported us during the initial analysis, which turned out to be very complex.

To whom do I recommend it? Jokingly I would say “to someone who is not sane!”, But in reality I recommend EKR to companies that want to really tidy up the amount of technical information they manage, because it allows understanding the redundancy of the contents and duplication of files. EKR clearly shows that the same information exists in a thousand different variations depending on the department: commercial, technical, etc. It allows to manage the data life cycle avoiding to wonder if it is reliable or not. If it is “validated” it is reliable! It forces you to think about the structuring of the product, optimizing the variants.

Staff training is a delicate phase, but as soon as the editors understand the benefits of the new system of working their collaboration is assured and the learning curve is relatively fast.