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Increase the productivity of your staff by giving them the information, training, and tools they need to do their jobs effectively.
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At Streamliners, we understand the need for clear and up-to-date policies and procedures, and efficient staff training systems. Our team is qualified and experienced in process design, development of user documentation, training systems, and deployment of knowledge and processes across company intranets. |
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Product Help Instructions Streamliners also writes installation, maintenance, and user instructions for high tech hardware and software. |
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Effective policy and procedure documentation improves business productivity and reduces business risk.
Policies and procedures contain a wealth of knowledge built up over years of experience involving research, trial and error, and decision making, about rules and methods for operating the business effectively. If well documented and maintained, they provide:
Streamliners partners with a wide range of clients to improve and manage their policy and procedure documentation. Our consultants and documenters work with the client's subject matter experts to:
At the core of many large organisations are business systems that handle their sales, manufacturing, distribution, fixed asset, financial, payroll, and staff information.
The business systems are often tailored to integrate with the company's policies and procedures. Many procedures include steps that require staff to enter information into the enterprise system or to generate reports from it.
The Streamliners documentation team works with client subject matter experts and system vendors to produce user instructions tailored to the client need, and integrated with the client's broader business policies and procedures.
Major business systems documented by Streamliners include:
Workflow processes are carried out by one or more people to complete a task. A well designed process will define the:
Streamliners specialises in designing processes that meet their business objective in the most efficient manner possible. We achieve this by working collaboratively with your subject matter experts and drawing on our wide experience of efficient process design.
We design processes on a work-flow basis, starting with the helicopter view and then drilling down to extra levels of detail as required. Our documentation systems for policies and procedures ensure that users can easily feed back changes in the business environment, which can then be collated for further process improvement and documentation and training updates.
A completed process design takes tangible form as:
Forms are the link pins in any process. They should instruct users about information to be collected, the required format, when to collect it, and who to forward it to.
Yet forms are often badly laid out, contain poor instructions, and are difficult to complete.
Streamliners specialises in creating forms that:
Whether you are developing a software application or a high tech piece of machinery, you need clear Help instructions to support the installers and operators. The easier you make the job for these people through effective Help, the more likely they are to:
Streamliners can work alongside your engineers to produce installation, maintenance, and user manuals, quick reference guides, and on-line help for your high tech hardware and software products.
Software developers and corporate IT departments should retain knowledge about the business rules, algorithms, configurations, and data policies that underpin the software applications and services they provide to their clients.
Too often that knowledge is held only in the heads or loose notes of contractors and staff that can leave the company at any time. Many developers assume that another IT professional coming in later will have sufficient information to pick up the thread and continue to maintain and develop the system effectively, however this is frequently not the case. The cost of reverse engineering or rebuilding those systems once the knowledge is lost can be significant.
The Streamliners technical writing team has extensive experience in systems documentation and can work closely with programmers and other IT professionals to capture the vital knowledge for future reference.
It is increasingly common for businesses to require their manuals to be accessible both on-line and on paper.
An effective on-line manual contains extensive hyperlinking between topics, low resolution images (small file size for fast transmission), and smart navigation and searching mechanisms.
A paper-based manual contains multiple cross references, high resolution print images with captions, and the traditional table of contents, index, headers and footers, and page numbering.
In the past, companies have had to choose between the cost of maintaining their on-line and paper manuals in two separate applications (with the associated doubling of cost and risk of getting content out of sync.) or the compromise of basic on-line manuals (with only a few of the features described earlier) converted from Word.
The Streamliners documentation service delivers both fully featured on-line and paper manuals for a fraction of the traditional cost, using its expertise in single- source methodologies and tools.
Most document sets will need to be updated over time. The Streamliners documentation service includes options for:
Streamliners hosts on-line document sets for clients without intranets. The document sets are hosted on secure (password-protected) or open web-sites depending on the client's requirement.
If you operate a branch network or employ 50 or more staff, then you understand how difficult it can be to maintain productivity and consistency across your business. What's more, your intellectual property is constantly at risk of walking out the door when staff leave.
