Meeting the experts

Founded in 1994, in the south of France, the company Soluscope designs, develops and manufactures complete solutions for the reprocessing of endoscopes. Acquired by Laboratoires Anios in 2014, Soluscope is now part of the Ecolab group. Innovative and committed, Soluscope is recognized by the medical and scientific community around the world for the safety, reliability and efficiency of its equipment, products and services. Today, the company has a strong international presence; Soluscope washer-disinfectors and storage enclosures are sold in more than 50 countries.

The strong growth of the company, both in France and internationally, had a strong impact on the workload of technical writers: the number of documents to be edited, in different formats and languages, kept increasing. increase. It was time to rethink the methodology and reconsider the tools used.

What approach would make it possible to both homogenize the content and avoid errors? Are there solutions that facilitate the automation of the layout while respecting the graphic charter of the company? Is it possible to optimize the management of the translation? The questions raised by the Soluscope teams during its prospecting phase were numerous. The company also had another priority: finding a solution developed by a local French company. This is how Soluscope identified the Calenco solution.

The choice of the Calenco software solution, a collaborative technical writing platform, responded to a fundamental challenge: optimizing and rationalizing documentation by reusing content from a single source. A radically different approach from that of the software used until then for the production of marketing and technical documents, InDesign and Word. With this change of tool, Soluscope wanted to facilitate the updating of the documents concerned and ensure the accuracy and conformity of the published content, the main objective being, of course, to save time. To date, the documentary production managed by the marketing department is colossal, since it produces around four hundred documents and twenty language versions, for the nine products of the current portfolio.

Taking into account the specificity of Soluscope, the constraints linked to the medical sector, implied developing a tailor-made, personalized and secure solution. After a phase of listening and analyzing the need, Calenco's development teams, supported by their project manager, built the solution around a fundamental principle: single sourcing and therefore the reuse of content. Soluscope's technical documentation, namely user manuals and technical manuals, have therefore been split into different sections, in order to create common modules.

The combined use of parameters and filters allows documents to be configured according to variables to take maximum advantage of modularity. As for the creation of dedicated style sheets, it guarantees compliance with the company's graphic charter, without having to worry about the form at the time of writing. Everything is automated, up to the editing of the documents, in PDF version. Finally, the Calenco interface is directly connected, via a gateway, with the translation platform used by Soluscope, Memsource, an application made possible thanks to the flexibility and openness of the Calenco software solution.

Beyond the technical changes, the deployment of the Calenco solution involved an overhaul of the approach and methodology in technical writing. On the Soluscope side, we had to rethink the architecture of the various files, in order to optimize the reuse of content and fully integrate the principle of the separation of content and form. This is where the training sessions provided by Calenco come in, essential to facilitate the use of the tool.

The deployment of the Calenco solution made it possible to achieve the objectives initially set. The articulation of documents around a single source facilitates updates, each modification being reflected automatically on all documents linked to the fragment concerned. In addition to the automation of the publication in PDF, the style sheets guarantee the homogeneity of the graphic charter, by product range for example. “Calenco is a solution particularly suited to all companies that manage large volumes of documentaries,” emphasizes Marina Lescombe, marketing documentation manager at Soluscope. The demonstration does not stop there. Document creation time was divided by four, that required for updates by five, not to mention the appreciable gain in terms of precision and consistency of the information disseminated.

“With the switch to the Calenco solution, in addition to the considerable time savings for our teams of writers, we have seen real progress in the overall quality of the documents edited,” summarizes Julien Pontet, digital expert. A change which also resulted in a marked improvement in Soluscope's general responsiveness to its customers. A requirement when working in the medical environment.

“We are delighted to see how the Calenco solution has advanced technical writing within Soluscope. He is a client whose requirement and sense of quality we share and who contributes to pushing us towards excellence.” says Camille Begnis, founder of NeoDoc.