How Does Automation Improve Documentation Challenges?

Are you overwhelmed by all the paperwork and documentation challenges in your organization? Do you think automation will help you to improve this? Are you wondering what it is, how it works, and how it streamlines documentation?

Wonder no more! This article will answer all these questions and clear all your doubts on this topic so you can quickly decide whether to implement documentation automation in your organization according to its specific needs. 

Let us start from the top!

What is documentation automation?

With documentation automation, you can create, manage, distribute, and templatize documents automatically instead of doing it manually. It automates repetitive tasks such as data collection and insertion while allowing you to create accurate and high-value documents that improve overall efficiency in all areas of your organization.

Doing all this work manually costs much more time, money, and effort, and the documents are still plagued with errors and inconsistencies.

Documentation automation ensures minimum errors and inconsistencies and, as a result, compliance.

Automation makes sense, especially if you are a big organization dealing with massive documentation and data. The great thing is that it works across industries and provides industry-specific solutions and customizations, from IT to Finance.

Some documents that you can automate in your organization for maximum efficiency are: 

• Product manuals
• User guides
• API Documentation
• Project plans
• White papers, etc.

But these are just a few examples. The sky is the limit when it comes to automating the documents in a way that is the most efficient for your work.

Let us understand in detail how it includes a facility for knowledge sharing. This means that all these documents are saved digitally in a central hub, and corresponding users are given access, ensuring much faster delivery and ease of use as needed. Automation improves your documentation challenges in different ways.

Here we go.

How does automation improve documentation challenges?

Faster Content Generation and Delivery

Preparing complex technical documents manually, from repair manuals to test schedules and case studies, can take time. Also, as these documents are meant for different departmental goals, they need to be delivered to different teams on time.

With documentation automation software, you can prepare templates for such documents and populate them on a case-to-case basis. The templates can be simple text blocks or include tables, graphs, and even images.

The software also comes with the facility for knowledge sharing. This means that all these documents are saved digitally in a central hub, and corresponding users are given access, ensuring much faster delivery and ease of use as needed and required.

Reduced Time Spent on Repetitive Tasks

A technical writer is a huge asset to a company’s success. They prepare documents to support product testing, employee training, marketing, and customer support, all while using organization-wide expertise.

Preparing such complex and specialized documents from scratch every time becomes repetitive and daunting without a document automation system. Using an outdated or sub-par tool to create technical documentation only adds to the woes of preparing these documents.

An efficient documentation tool takes out repetition from this process with templates for all kinds of documents. This also saves hours of technical writing time to meet other challenges such as last-minute product changes and gathering information from SMEs that need personal intervention.  Having a structured workflow ensures consistency, accountability, and efficiency throughout the documentation cycle. Workflow designer and workflow assignments, to help project team members to create a step-by-step stage for any new or existing documentation.

On the advanced features, you can use an SEO description generator, which will automatically run through the article and help the writer create a quick SEO description.By eliminating the boring, repetitive element of the job, document automation improves the internal processes of the organization, increases employee efficiency, and results in better work-life balance.

Elimination of Human Error

Preparing technical documentation is a complex task in itself. When you add up data entry, adjusting poorly structured documents, and lack of information about product users, there is a good chance for errors. Even after countless hours of proofreading, errors are a real possibility.

Minor errors can lead to major challenges on the customer and legal fronts if there are compliance issues. Documentation errors also mean that people in the organization may make decisions based on wrong or faulty information.

By automating the whole process of creating, templatizing, and managing documents, you can greatly minimize the possibility of such errors in documentation.  The use of advanced features like AI Glossary Generator is designed to reduce human intervention in creating and maintaining a comprehensive glossary for your documentation. This feature leverages advanced AI algorithms to identify key terms and concepts within your content and automatically generate precise and relevant definitions

Properly done templates eliminate the risk of unstructured content and the resulting errors and confusion. If the tool is equipped with an in-built spell checker and allows seamless integration with some popular writing tools, like Grammarly, it ensures clear, professional, and error-free writing. 

Real-Time Feedback and Version Control

It is common for technical documentation to have inconsistencies. Documents are created over time, and multiple authors work on them, making them inconsistent in terms of tone, style, and even layout.

Documentation automation avoids these inconsistencies as the authors follow templates, adhere to style guides, and leave comments about their work.

They can track different versions of a document while working on it. Each time the document is modified, the version control number is updated, letting the current user know that they are looking at the latest version.

Only specific people are permitted to work on the documents based on their roles, to avoid unnecessary changes. In some cases, version control may also be necessary for compliance so it is important to take that into account.

Also, the software lets you keep track of all the feedback across all your documents and categories.

Secure Storage and Retrieval of Documents

Unlike physical documentation or even digital documentation, which is all over the place and can be quite daunting to trace documents from, document automation software stores all your documents in a central hub.

People across departments and functions can access these documents based on their permissions. There is no lag between the requirement and the retrieval of the documents allowing their most efficient use across the organization.

So, now that we know how automation can be a game changer for documentation, let’s explore how it works.

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How does it work?

Document templates

As discussed earlier, templatization is one of the key factor for documentation automation. All good documentation software ones come with readymade templates for different sets of industries depending on their core market.

You can of course make your templates and allow you to build a template from scratch or customize the existing templates.

Either way, you can create faster and more professional-looking documents for your organization. These templates are professionally designed, interactive, and rich with multiple options, such as videos, infographics, charts, etc.

Branding and design

While creating a documentation, automation will also let you customize the documents to reflect your brand style. So, you can simply feed your already existing style guides and brand elements into the software and it will let you customize your designs as per your brand.

To ensure department-wise goals for preparing different documents are met, team members from respective departments can customize their designs in tandem with the company guidelines.

All documents to be presented, shared, and accessed from the device of your choice—mobile or laptop/ computer.

Design Workflow

Good automation lets you design and manage your documentation workflow process. This means that you no longer need to spend time manually obtaining and giving approvals.

Simply design your custom workflows and it automatically sends notifications or pings an approver when their action is required. The document is then passed to the next person and so on, as per the workflow created without any manual intervention.

Integrations with other tools

Last but not least, one of the most important features of documentation software is its ability to integrate with your existing business software. It should be able to combine data available across systems in your organization and combine it with third-party tools that you and your team are using.

You can use various tools for different purposes, such as a help desk, analytics, commenting, chat, translation, and code repository. Some examples of such tools are Google Analytics, Freshdesk, Disqus, Hotjar, and Intercom.

So, before you choose a software, pay special attention on how its integration capabilities.

Conclusion

I hope that this article helped you familiarize yourself with document automation in all its aspects. All you have to do is choose the right software for your organization and work with them to simplify and automate documentation in your organization.