How P&I Design provides clients with good-quality and fast documentation with FlippingBook Publisher

Apart from providing their customers with an actual help in engineering and designing chemical plants and storages, P&I has a task of providing lots of special knowledge about chemical industry and important documentation, such as:

• Design manuals that include specifications, reports and drawings,
  
  
• Testing manuals for yearly testing and verification of the equipment and
  
  
• Management manuals on how to operate it on a daily basis.
  

"At first we used paper copies of documentation that we sent to our clients when the project was completed. But what we found was that when we used paper copies, and sent out a revised drawing to our clients, chances were that it would not end up in the manual, but sit on someone's desk", says Ransome. "So our challenge was to create an online documentation system for our clients, where we could update any document, and it would immediately appear for all clients whom it applied to. Also, we wanted it to look good, like the paper manual."

To make the manuals convenient for the clients, P&I Design made thorough and detailed PDF documents full of valuable data, individual drawings and specifications. They used a PDF container software to share the documents with the clients. And though the manuals were quite easy to use, because of their size it was quite hard to dowload them, especially on iPads.

"We needed a solution that could handle big files, structure them, made them fast-loading and good-looking", explained Ransome.

To improve customers' experience with documentation, P&I Design decided to enhance their manuals with FlippingBook Publisher. It turned out that in comparison with PDF format, FlippingBook offers several important features: pre-set Table of Contents created from bookmarks in the PDF, custom design and fast access to documents of any size.

While keeping the documents on Flippingbook-provided cloud, P&I Design makes sure that all the information stays confidential. Mr Ransome explains how it works: "We create a login name and password for every client on our site for their online documentation. They can login to our website and see and index page with the URLs to the documents on FlippingBook cloud that are relevant to them."

However, even if the new format was implied for the sake of the clients' comfort, P&I Design came across with a bit of resistance at first: "The process industry is a serious business, and I remember going into a meeting with a client who said, "well I don't like this, it's a bit gimmicky, I'd rather have the old docmonster", says Ransome.

But FlippingBook is quite a flexible tool and after a short while and tweaking some options the team found a formula that worked for their audience: " We now add the Table of contents by default, making it easy to jump to the right drawing or report quickly, and we have maximized the size of our publication on screen. We even turn the page-flipping sound off. And that client now really likes it! Another one can't wait until we bring all his documentation to FlippingBook, which we're now in the process of doing".

There's also turned out to be another case for using FlippingBook documentation in a daily work of P&I Design. "Engineers who go out on site visits bring their iPads with FlippingBooks on it, so they always have the most recent documentation when they go on site as well, even when they don't have access to a computer".

Having implemented FlippingBook as a primary format for its documentation, P&I Design achieved the results they were hoping to. Mainly - to provide their clients with good-quality and nice looking documentation that is easy to navigate around and quick to load.

"Any client can get into his online documentation, from any device, anywhere in the world. The other beauty of it, is that there is only one copy of it, that we control and update. So they always work with the copy that we want them to work with, as opposed to an old issue. It's a bit of service from us to our clients, as opposed to giving them a manual, when the job is finished and also forces us to keep our documentation up to date", says Ransome.