Annual and Quarterly Reports with one2edit™: Faster processes, fewer error sources, more transparency, and less stress

The Starting Point: The Linde Group, a successful engineering company and global market leader in industrial gases, needed a more efficient solution to produce its bilingual annual and quarterly reports. The collaboration between internal departments (i.e. corporate communications, finance, investor relations, risk management) and external service providers (i.e. design, translation) was characterized by numerous process interruptions and format changes. As is normal, the internal departments work mainly with Word and Excel. All communication with both the internal departments and the external service providers (who translate and update the InDesign documents) was done via telephone and email. The many enquiries and comparisons of data in the process chain were not only time-consuming and exhausting, but also increased the effort required to eliminate all errors in the report.

The Task: To create annual and quarterly reports in two languages with less effort and more transparency, while also reducing potential sources of error.

The Challenge: To implement a collaboration and publishing solution that partially automates and simplifies processes between the various internal content suppliers, the translation agency, and the design agency, while also making the transfer from Word / Excel to InDesign both secure and error-free.

The Solution: Linde was looking for a content-management system that would allow participants with different rights and roles to work on content in parallel, where content could flow directly into InDesign, and from which PDFs could be easily generated. The team evaluated various solutions and rated one2edit™ not as the best possible solution, but as the only one that met all the requirements. one2edit offers all the functionality required for smooth interaction with InDesign documents "out of the box", meaning that Linde's corporate financial reporting team was able to start work immediately. BRANDGUARDIAN® supported Linde in linking the very complex Excel spreadsheets to the report layout in InDesign.

The implementation: With one2edit™, Linde can link the relevant data from their complex Master Excel table, which itself is linked to various sources such as SAP, directly to the 250-page annual report in InDesign. Changes in the table are automatically (and therefore 100% correctly) transferred to the appropriate places in the InDesign document. This means that the internal departments can literally change data right up to the last minute without adding any work to the creation process. The design agency takes care of the graphical fine-tuning, but does not need to transfer any data – a huge advantage. In addition, the translation process is partially automated and much more efficient than before: Corporate Communications drags and drops the required translations into a one2edit translation workflow, which is linked to SDL Tridion. There, the texts are immediately translated, returned, and inserted directly into the InDesign document. With one2edit, it is also possible to generate intermediate PDF reports at any time with the push of a button. Previously, this was only possible on request from the design agency. All of the above guarantees perfect reports in two languages with less effort and, above all, less stress for everyone involved.