A Strategic Approach to Unambiguous Communication and Operational Excellence
Industry: Urban Mobility (Elevators, Escalators, Moving Walks)
Client: Schindler Group
Training Locations: Ebikon, Switzerland (on-site) & Shanghai, China (online)
Service Provided: Simplified Technical English (STE) Training & Documentation Rewriting
Introduction
Clear, unambiguous, and consistent technical documentation is paramount in the complex and safety-critical world of urban mobility. This case study highlights a successful engagement with Schindler Group, a global leader in elevators, escalators, and related services, focused on achieving their technical communication through comprehensive Simplified Technical English (STE) implementation.
Client Background
Schindler Group, headquartered in Ebikon, Switzerland, is renowned for its innovative and sustainable mobility solutions. With a vast international presence and a diverse workforce, ensuring that technical manuals, maintenance procedures, and product documentation are universally understood is a strategic imperative, particularly for safety and operational efficiency.
The Challenge
Prior to the engagement, Schindler, like many multinational corporations, faced the inherent challenges of technical documentation:
- Ambiguity: Standard English, with its rich vocabulary and complex grammatical structures, can lead to misinterpretations, especially among non-native English speakers.
- Inconsistency: Multiple authors and external vendors, potentially across different regions, could result in varied writing styles and terminology, hindering clarity and increasing translation costs.
- Translation Efficiency: Complex source texts often led to higher translation costs and potential errors in localised versions, impacting global operations.
- Safety Criticality: In the elevator and escalator industry, any misunderstanding in technical instructions can have severe safety implications.
Schindler recognised the need for a standardised approach to technical English to mitigate these risks and improve the overall quality and efficiency of their documentation.
Phase 2: Document Rewriting and Refinement Following the initial training, a direct engagement commenced with key personnel to apply STE principles to existing documentation. This involved close collaboration with:
- Principal Corporate Technical Author: To ensure the practical application of STE rules and to establish internal champions for the standard.
- Head of Corporate Technical Documentation: To oversee the strategic implementation and integration of STE into Schindler’s documentation workflows.
This hands-on rewriting process ensured that the theoretical knowledge gained during training was immediately put into practice, demonstrating tangible improvements in clarity and consistency.
Phase 3: Global Expansion of Training Recognising the success and the need for global consistency, the training was extended to other critical regions. A dedicated online training session was conducted for:
- Corporate Technical Documentation colleagues in Shanghai, China: This expanded the reach of STE adoption, ensuring that documentation produced in a key international hub also conformed to the new global standard.
Key Stakeholders and Organisational Impact
The success of this initiative was a testament to the collaborative effort across various departments and external partners, demonstrating how STE benefits different parts of the organisation:
- Leadership and Management: Gained strategic alignment and understanding of STE’s business value in achieving safety, efficiency, and global reach.
- Engineering and Product Development Teams (including Subject Matter Experts): Benefited from improved clarity in technical specifications, design documents, and maintenance requirements, ensuring precise input and reduced ambiguity from the source.
- Technical Documentation Teams (in-house and external partners): Acquired practical skills in applying STE rules, leading to more consistent, unambiguous, and efficient content creation for manuals, procedures, and other technical assets.
- Terminology and Language Specialists: Enhanced their ability to manage and control technical vocabulary, ensuring consistency across all documentation and facilitating improved translation quality.
- Translation Teams: Experienced streamlined translation processes due to the reduced ambiguity and increased consistency of STE-compliant source texts.
Results and Impact
The implementation of STE at Schindler Group yielded significant benefits:
- Achieved Clarity and Readability: Documents became easier to understand for a global audience, including non-native English speakers, reducing the risk of misinterpretation.
- Improved Consistency: A unified writing style and controlled vocabulary ensured consistency across all technical documentation, regardless of the author or origin.
- Increased Efficiency: Streamlined writing processes and clearer source texts led to more efficient documentation creation and review cycles.
- Reduced Translation Costs: The unambiguous nature of STE significantly lowered translation costs and improved the quality of translated materials.
- Strengthened Safety: By eliminating ambiguity in critical instructions, the overall safety of operations and maintenance procedures was achieved.
Testimonials
This impact was echoed by participants:
Roland Kiser, Terminology Coordinator at Schindler, noted: “This course shares a good overview of structure, purpose, history, and contextual information about STE. The limited vocabulary and restricted list of words, short sentence constructions, active voice, and imperative verb usage are valuable takeaways messages to act upon in Simplified English. The examples used in this training are quite realistic and it is very likely that I will recommend this STE training to someone else.”
Cécile Roos, Corporate Translation Manager, added: “Entertaining, short, and clear presentation of the STE specification and rule sets. Overall, a good mix of rules, examples, and exercises. The course was very much on point and encouraged me to write in a more structured way. This will help the readers to properly understand my message even in business writing. Shumin had a very calm way of leading all of us through the training. Her style of teaching is rather empathetic and she keeps the group working effectively with timely breaks in between. Thanks Shumin for an enjoyable course with the perfect score of 10/10 in terms of trainer evaluation.”
Marco Valtangoli, Senior Corporate Technical Author at Schindler, also provided valuable feedback: “A very important and highlighted point during the introduction is that STE is an English language specification that is not only applicable for companies in the aerospace & defence industry. Rule 5.2 where you only have one instruction per sentence is important to us. Not being able to use the verb “CHECK’ that is only used as an approved STE noun poses a challenge to me all the time. I really appreciate the STE writing rules that give us the possibility to improve the consistency of our documents. The workshop exercises were of high interest value and drive home the point that it is important to learn by doing. Although a time-consuming process, the writing workshop impressed on me that the need to prioritise the analysis of our internal documents. Shumin is a competent trainer who does not only focus on explaining and enforcing the “writing rules”, but is always available to understand and empathise with the training needs of the class.”
Conclusion
The comprehensive STE training and document rewriting initiative with Schindler Group stands as a strong example of how strategic investment in technical communication can drive operational excellence, improve safety, and foster global consistency within a leading industrial enterprise. By empowering their diverse teams with the tools and knowledge of Simplified Technical English, Schindler reinforced its commitment to delivering clear, reliable, and high-quality documentation worldwide.
If your organisation faces similar challenges in achieving uncompromising clarity and operational readiness through precise communication, discover how Shufrans TechDocs can help. Learn more about our ASD-STE100 training and consulting services:
