Case Study 1 -Japanese Telecommunications Company

 Summary

To offer clients the optimum solutions from a global perspective that overcome any corporate or national cultural differences, a specialist service is required that focuses entirely on consulting.

In this case study, we show that making corporate alliances and joint developments more internationalized can be very beneficial for the document production workplace.

Large investments are made in document engineering services (providing solutions for developing document creation systems and improving efficiency) in order to achieve greater efficiency levels, and the demand for such important services is likely to continue in the future for corporations that develop and operate global document systems.

This case study shows how, in a corporate alliance, the different document production systems and production flows that were independently developed and operated around the world were linked together on the client's side in Japan.

  * TOIN constructed the SGML-based document production system for the Japanese company.

 Challenges

• The client had invested heavily in the existing production system, so they did not want to move away from existing operation methods and tools
• The client needed an operation method or system where the link destination can be specified independently by either side during creation
• The situation required a mechanism where the final document can be verified independently
• The client wanted a system where the processes after content creation are performed automatically and not manually

 Solutions

• We analyzed and expanded the existing DTD (Document Type Definition) to construct a mechanism in which documents could be created without moving away from the current environment and processes
• We devised automatic link settings and management methods based on the document structures of both sides
• We created a virtual image function for verifying the final document

The processes of conversion after content creation, link creation and the verification (QA) function were all automated. Agreements that were made between both sides in the course of many international meetings were highlighted on the server as an application. This meant that work was not just pushed on to the affiliates in Europe; rather, work would be shared equally to achieve common objectives. This satisfied our Japanese client, who agreed to our plan for the division of roles in constructing the linked system for minimizing the required investment.

 Technology and Tools

• Windows Terminal Service
• Metamorphosis: Structured document processing language
• OmniMark: Structured document processing language
• MS Visual Basic: For creating GUI user interfaces for the conversion processing application
• FrameMaker + SGML structured application template