Helping Wrycan reduce NFPA’s publishing costs and create new digital products
Project takeaways
98.5% reduction in man-hours per new publication, from 70 hours down to less than one.
3,500 total hours saved across the existing Redline catalogue.
Full automation implemented, enabling all 300 NFPA publications to include Redline editions.
Human error eliminated, saving significant time and production costs.
“When producing the print version of their Redline products, the change markup and storage approach used by Wrycan and DeltaXignia ensures the pagination of the final document is preserved perfectly from the original safety code or standards document.”
Daniel Reed, Managing Director, Wrycan
About Wrycan
Founded in 2003, Wrycan, Inc. delivers Content Engineering services and technology to publishers and content producers. Wrycan’s Content Engineering solution bridges the gap between content production and digital delivery. Companies building web and mobile platforms leverage our turn-key solution to successfully deliver content to their customers.
Headquarters
MA, United States
Company Size
SMB (0-100 employees)
Industry
Information Technology & Services
Website
www.wrycan.com
The Challenge
Needing to know what has changed
The NFPA is a major standards body in the USA and has a catalogue of around 300 fire and electrical safety codes and standards. In print form they are typically hundreds or even thousands of pages long.
When a standard or code is updated, typically every three to five years, many of their customers – including officials, professionals and training and certification bodies – need to know exactly what has changed. The NFPA publishes detailed documents, ‘Redlines’, which compare the current and previous editions of a specific standard or code. In the past they were prepared manually, taking many hours of painstaking work, so it was only practical to create them for their top fifty publications and only in traditional form, not as interactive HTML products.
Approaches taken, nothing worked
The NFPA had tried to reduce this manual effort with different approaches. Tracking changes during the complex editorial process proved unwieldy, while adding change markers was prone to errors. Programmatic approaches looked promising, but quickly went wrong or became unreliable, for example when sections were renumbered or similar phrases were repeated in different sections.
As they embarked on a project to streamline digital product creation, they asked their chosen technology partner, Wrycan, to provide a fully integrated solution to automate comparing and differencing.
Build or buy
With their substantial expertise in publishing technology, Wrycan evaluated existing differencing products against the cost of developing the capability in-house.
They recognised the NFPA wanted flexibility, rather than adapting their working to suit the product; they needed fine control of the differencing for different situations; and there were numerous complex scenarios that it needed to handle.
Senior technical specialists at Wrycan carried out detailed evaluations of the available technologies and concluded the best results and lowest project risk would be achieved by integrating XML Compare from DeltaXignia.
The Solution
XML Compare adds needed functionality Wrycan delivered a project which combined their Content Base product with XML Compare. This allows the NFPA to manage all of their content in a single repository, adding automated comparisons in a product-agnostic form. Comparisons are made on the source content and saved in the same place. This allows NFPA staff to generate different products using the exact same difference data, including printed documents and HTML editions.
For HTML products, the system automatically applies styling to each change, in a way that is familiar to users of the printed publications. It also includes the capability to provide more comprehensive change indicators, including toggling the view of all deletions, additions and other changes.
When producing the print version of their Redline products, the change markup and storage approach used by Wrycan and DeltaXignia ensures the pagination of the final document is preserved perfectly from the original safety code or standards document.The Results
Labour saving close to 3500 hours
With an automated differencing capability, the NFPA has reduced the time to create each new Redline publication from seventy hours to less than one hour. Across the current Redline catalogue of fifty products, this means a total labour saving close to 3500 hours.
With the resources freed-up by this new system, the NFPA has now started creating Redline products for all of their 300 publications.
They are also planning new, interactive HTML versions of the series. Thanks to the product-agnostic approach of Content Base and XML Compare, these new products will also be generated automatically, with a fraction of the resources previously required.
“Senior technical specialists at Wrycan carried out detailed evaluations of the available technologies and concluded the best results and lowest project risk would be achieved by integrating DeltaXignia Compare from DeltaXignia”
Daniel Reed, Managing Director, Wrycan
Let's Deal with Change
DeltaXignia’s products are used throughout the world, from SMEs to global enterprises. Our comparison and merging software transform the way our customers handle change in their documentation and data. If the above story resonated with your own challenges get in touch with us by either booking a discovery call or filling in our contact form.
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