Who Should Read This: Anyone who has done, currently does, or anticipates facing the painstaking task of documenting and maintaining changes to complex technical or engineering documents to ensure that agreement, approval, revisions, publication, and storage are all performed according to policy and regulations.
Our Client: Senior Director responsible for major capital projects such as construction design, engineering, costing, and project management.
This company’s business requires a wide array of major capital asset types to service their customers. Their Construction Design and Engineering team is responsible for proposing, gaining agreement, and running complex technical formulas to determine the requirements for materials, labor, and overall cost to build out or reconfigure different types of assets and spaces. Getting these requirements right the first time is worth millions to the client.
The formulas used to calculate project requirements must be precise. They must gain the approval of a diverse group of engineers across the business. They drive costs on multi-million-dollar projects. And, to meet the company’s compliance and risk management standards, they must be maintained in the company’s approved document control system as a record of project assumptions, inputs, logic, and calculations, presented according to the company’s technical documentation standards. The logic and associated calculations in the control document and the software must match exactly. Any desired changes to the document or the software must undergo an approval and test cycle before revising the document of record and the software logic.
Abundiant was asked to review the documentation, formulas, and performance of the formulas in the software and then guide the client through an initial reconciliation and clean up and establish a new way to synchronize the process.
Everyone associated with this process expected the client to end up employing an experienced technical writer who could double as a document controller, who would ultimately be tasked with managing the content of the documents and the flow of documentation through the document control system. As it turned out, however, Abundiant was able to automate a solution that met the client’s requirements without the conventional requirements of manual intervention or control from someone outside the system.
Abundiant’s solution has enabled the client's team to own and drive the process of reconciling and revising its software and control documents from a single system. This eliminates timing gaps and opportunities for inconsistencies among drafts, approved documents, software logic, and records in the document control system. Our solution also provides an audit trail of all changes and handles the publication and porting of code for implementation. By closing the daylight between steps in the revision process, Abundiant provided the client with better control, accuracy, and flexibility in managing this crucial technical information—giving them greater control over costs, mitigating risk, and allowing them to serve their customers better.
