Getting close to deadline and still: Chasing content? Still missing content from key contributors in a different timezone? Challenges with formatting? Is this a familiar situation?
A common challenge when creating bids and proposals, or any time sensitive document for that matter, with multiple contributors often spread across various timezones. This is a problem that many organizations face in their day-to-day operations. A key reason is the challenges inherent with a file. Many companies have solutions whereas contributors needs to check-in and check-out content (a file) or they use email to distribute tasks and content.
Why? Because when using a solution reliant on MS Word (file-driven), it is the only way to ensure that content and tasks can be distributed to team members. The Word document needs to be broken down into several sections and thereby several files. This again leads to your team working fragmented and creates challenges for the project managers to keep track of progress. Another agonizing challenge with files is versioning and formatting issues.
True Collaborative Solutions
Document co-authoring solutions allow documents to be edited simultaneously by multiple contributors. True collaborative solutions are built on databases, and allow for different sub-sections of a document to be edited in parallel. Basically, everyone can work on the same document at the same time, while management has complete control of the process. Automatic formatting, layout and numbering ensure writers focus solely on content. Web native solutions enable contributions from multiple locations and organizations while managers have complete control of the production process from day one. This helps organizations drastically increase the quality of their content.
Document co-authoring solutions also often come with the added benefit of master content (data) management (MCM) and composite document management (CDM). This means that end users easily can keep their data in a single-source repository, ensure consistency and update all live documents at the same time, while using the content dynamically for various types of documents.
Single source publishing allows the same content to be used in different documents or in various formats. The labor-intensive and expensive work of editing need only be carried out once, on one document. Further transformations are carried out mechanistically, by document automation tools (Document Collaboration in virtual teams).
Moving to a database driven document solution for your proposals will increase efficiency, quality, integrity and more - giving you back control.
At Xait, this is just what we focus on, database driven document solution. Contact our team by reaching out here
Kris Sæther
Chief Commercial Officer
kris.saether@xait.com
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