Abbott Laboratories

Abbott Laboratories is an American pharmaceuticals and healthcare products company. It has 72,000 employees and operates in over 130 countries. The company headquarters are in Abbott Park, North Chicago, Illinois.

How we helped

This case study looks at a top life sciences company that has a large line of chemical and hardware products that are sold around the world for use in labs and hospital emergency rooms. When a patient comes in, possibly unconscious, various tests must be done before physicians can begin administering treatment. This company’s machines are used to conduct the tests, and their chemical products are used in the machines during each test. Because the users are medical staff, not technicians, and because the industry is regulated, reliability and ease of use for all the company’s products and supporting content are critical.

What we achieved

We suggested that this organization build processes and systems to support modular reuse across deliverables and audiences and to track effectiveness for both internal and external content consumers. The plan was to check the product facts once, review them once, then reuse them in different target contexts and automatically push them to as many formats as required, including HTML for the intranet troubleshooting guides Adobe InDesign for print deliverables like guides, labels, and inserts.

This content would not be managed on the intranet alone. The management would begin at the source – on the cross-channel repository that fed the intranet and other channels with verified, ready-to-format content.

The labels for physical printing sometimes needed visual layout changes, so we suggested a mostly automated publishing system that:

• Takes the latest content from the shared repository (of XML modules)
• Lays out the content as a “nearly there” version of the print layout
• Allows publishing specialists to jump into the process to tweak the layout as needed before going to production

It was not full automation, but in this case, the client did not want full automation. With this process, the business could benefit from the following:

• Partial automation for all print and
• full automation for HTML and
• some simpler print deliverables Up-to-date, accurate, and signed-off information with the ability to apply last-minute tweaks.