One year of after-sales documentation at the academy

What exactly is after-sales documentation?

After-sales documentation builds on the classic operating instructions and deals specifically with service and maintenance topics. The maintenance instructions are primarily aimed at service and maintenance personnel, while the adjustment instructions are intended for our dealers' trained service staff. We have already implemented content for the latest G-series machines, such as the 830 G and 360 G.

Our aim is to offer dealers and customers greater benefits and to improve our services step by step. The new maintenance and adjustment instructions therefore complement existing products such as Trouble Shooter and Service Bulletins.

What was the starting point for the project?

The Academy was tasked with setting up its personnel and subject matter in such a way that we could develop and design maintenance manuals directly from the training environment in future. Romy and Hendrika joined the team for this purpose – and this also created a new area of responsibility for the Academy: as a service provider that actively helps to shape service documentation. I am delighted that we were able to get this project off the ground so quickly – and especially that we were able to recruit two new colleagues to the Academy team who are now fully focused on these tasks. The feedback from the company and our dealers gives us the confidence that we are on the right track. Together, we want to further expand this new field of activity for the Academy in order to offer even better support to the service department in the field. We are already benefiting from the good service documentation in training situations – and are delighted to be able to offer our customers and partners additional added value.

How important was the cooperation with other departments?

It would not have been possible without close communication. We were in constant dialogue with customer service, testing, control technology, documentation and TB. This is precisely what made it possible for us to produce four maintenance manuals, two adjustment manuals and six maintenance checklists/plans in just twelve months.

Where are we headed now?

We have created a very good foundation: scalable, multilingual and technologically future-oriented. Milestones to date include the introduction of a standardised review process via SharePoint, the modular structure and CAD-based visualisations. But we are not standing still – we are currently working on maintenance manuals and modularising the assembly instructions for large machines. For animated illustrative materials, we will be working with a specialised department in future to provide us with these representations. This will make the content more vivid and easier to use. There is still a lot of potential here.

Incidentally, you can find our maintenance instructions in the Mediapool under the tab ‘Service’ > ‘Maintenance instructions’.