CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
25 May 2005
Implementation Investments
Siemens Medical Solutions Standardizes On Astoria Software
Astoria Software , a provider of XML content management solutions, announced that Siemens Medical Solutions is standardizing on Astoria's content management software as part of a new system designed to streamline the creation, management and distribution of user operating manuals and technical service documents. Siemen's overall goal is to ensure the medical equipment provider delivers the highest quality product and technical information to its customer service engineers (CSE) while enhancing product ease-of-use among its 60,000 end customers around the world.
Siemens Medical Solutions is presenting the initial results of its new technical information system at the Gilbane CMS Conference today in Amsterdam. http://www.gilbane.com/conferences/Amsterdam_05_program.html .
Among the results is higher customer satisfaction, reduced costs in producing technical documents and less time in completing service calls.
Each year Siemens Medical Solutions produces thousands of technical documents with hundreds of thousands of pages of technical content in multiple languages to support several hundred healthcare products. These products range from ultrasound and magnetic resonance equipment to angiography and nuclear medicine devices.
"With so many different medical products in the market and so many healthcare professionals using more than one of our products at a single location on a regular basis, we wanted to make it significantly easier for them to learn how to use our products and for our CSEs to service them as quickly as possible," said Uwe Danner, Content Management Systems Project Manager of Siemens Medical Solutions. "Now, by standardizing on Astoria and the rest of our new system, we have a common technical information platform, so our customers and CSEs can quickly find out what they need to do and what they need to know to resolve a problem or get the most out of our equipment, no matter what product they are using or working on."
Siemens Medical Solutions' goal in designing its new technical information system was to reduce the material cost of producing and managing its technical information and documents; reduce the time it took CSEs to service its many products; ensure that proper technical information is available to customers and CSEs when new Siemens Medical Solutions products are shipped; and to increase overall customer satisfaction.
Siemens Medical Solutions initially deployed Astoria Classic as the heart of its new technical information system in 2003 at a single location addressing a small range of products and involving a limited number of technical documentation employees. Over the past year, it has expanded its use to include multiple additional locations in Europe, China and the US. And now, as the standard platform, it will be rolled out worldwide to address the 2,200 documents Siemens Medical Solutions prepares annually in numerous languages and delivers in multiple digital and print formats.
"We share with Siemens Medical Solutions a strong belief that by separating content from layout you can dramatically simplify and speed the production of technical data regardless of its format," said Tom Steding, CEO of Astoria Software. "Siemens Medical Solutions' implementation of XML content management to achieve significant business results exemplifies the power of adopting a bold content and document strategy."
Astoria Classic is an XML content management platform that provides flexible reuse of content at the component level. It leverages the inherent flexibility of XML to store and manage content with specific knowledge of hierarchy and attributes, ensuring the structural integrity and flexibility of content assets. It frees content and structure from the rigid confines of relational tables and provides the highest degree of flexibility for change, a major requirement of the new solution at Siemens Medical Solutions.
Astoria also provides version and variant management, clear audit trails, and document compare capabilities for change management. It includes built-in workflow, making it easy to track, manage and approve content as it is developed and, because it is based on XML, Astoria Classic supports multiple formats and is completely output independent, which allows the delivery of content online or offline, on CD-ROM or printed materials.
Given the bold vision and broad affect its new information management solution would have across the organization, Siemens Medical Solutions turned to Lindau, Germany-based TANNER AG, a systems integration firm specializing in print and publishing systems, to develop the solution's overall architecture.
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