The benefits of content reuse and how it delivers ROI through a CCMS
30 Sep 2024
10 mins
You may already know about some of the advantages of content reuse, including cost reduction and shorter time to publish. Thanks to an independent study, I can put some pretty compelling figures around those cost savings.
The study assessed the five-year ROI achieved by organizations using Tridion Docs, a component content management system (CCMS) that enables content reuse. The research revealed that companies of all sizes can achieve significant ROI through savings on content development and translation – even when licensing, support and data migration costs are factored in. The larger the company, the greater the potential for savings:
- Mid-market companies might realize over 300% ROI
- Large enterprises could see up to 687% ROI
- Very large enterprises could achieve up to 961% ROI
ROI achievable with Tridion Docs CCMS
If that's piqued your interest, read on to find out more about how content reuse through a CCMS could help you make savings in your content budget for next year – as well as realize many other benefits.
When does content reuse deliver value?
Many organizations have a variety of use cases for reusing content. For example:
In the manufacturing and automotive sectors, technical writers and marketing teams often need to repurpose product manuals and technical specs into training materials, sales presentations and customer support documents. Reusing content can help them save time and maintain quality and compliance by delivering accurate, consistent information for multiple platforms and stakeholders.
In the medical device industry, content from regulatory submissions, clinical trial documents, and product safety reports can be adapted for other purposes, such as instructions for use (IFU), marketing collateral, training sessions and regulatory compliance audits. Reusing content helps these organizations meet the stringent documentation requirements of their regulated industry while reducing authors' workload.
Similar use cases exist in industries such as financial services (e.g. for policies and procedures), in franchising organizations (for employee onboarding and training materials), in large consulting firms (e.g. audit and other procedures), and many more.
Information can be reused in various parts of a publication, as well as for different output deliverables as shown below.
Reusing content components across output types and channels
Content reuse: controlled or uncontrolled?
How many thousands of documents in your organization might need to use the same chunks of content? What happens when an author can't find the content chunk they want to reuse, or don't know it already exists? Typically, they write – or rewrite – it.
If they do manage to find the chunk they want, they might copy the source and paste it into the new document. But if there's no connection between the two versions, they can soon get out of sync, potentially leading to accuracy, branding or compliance issues. If changes are made to the original chunk, how do you ensure they're reflected in the the copied chunk? Some authoring teams manually track which content chunks have been reused where and, when the original content gets updated, they make the same updates to all the copies. But if you're working with large sets of documentation or multiregional and multilingual content, it’s not hard to see that things could soon get out of control.
If we think of copying and pasting content chunks as uncontrolled content reuse, then the alternative has to be controlled content reuse. So, what does that look like?
In controlled content reuse, a content chunk (or component) is created once and used anywhere it's needed without being copied. This is known as the create once, publish anywhere (COPE) principle. It sounds simple, but the impact can be huge. As a key aspect of structured content authoring (SCA), controlled content reuse enables the reuse of any approved content component anywhere, without having to copy/paste or otherwise duplicate it. In an SCA environment, authors produce content in small chunks that can be easily managed, kept up to date and reused in a controlled way. In the next section, we'll look at this in more detail and discuss the technology that can help.
The controlled content reuse approach
Controlled content reuse with a component content management system (CCMS)
When you read a document, web page or other output that's been created using a structured content approach, what you're looking at has been assembled from multiple reusable content components, and has had a stylesheet applied to format the content into its final output.
Content components reused and assembled into a document
A component content management system (CCMS), also known as a structured content management system, is the technology that lets you create and manage structured content components and reuse them in a controlled way.
The writing team defines the smallest content components (also known as units or blocks) that are stored in the CCMS. Instead of being, say, entire documents, these components may be paragraphs, images, sentences, product names or any other unit that's useful to your organization. Held in the CCMS, they become your organization's single source of truth (SSOT).
A CCMS gives content owners and authors a comprehensive overview of the entire set of content components used across the organization's publications, product versions and language variants. Additionally, it tells authors the status of each component. For example, is it in draft state, or has it been approved? Are there multiple variations? Has it been translated and used elsewhere? All this information helps authors quickly find the relevant content components and reuse them wherever and whenever they need to by inserting them into the document or other asset they're producing.
The CCMS automatically keeps track of the relationship between the source component and all the locations where it's reused – doing away with risky and error-prone manual tracking processes. If the source component gets updated, the changes are automatically propagated to all instances of its reuse. (This happens in a controlled way to avoid unexpected changes to documents and other assets.)
Principal Technical Writer and Tools Specialist at Waters Corporation
Verbatim vs derivative content reuse
At this stage, you may think that content reuse revolves around reusing copy chunks with no ability to modify them.
This is certainly one type of content reuse. In the context of structured content authoring with a CCMS, reusing content chunks unchanged is known as verbatim content reuse (or locked reuse). This is useful when information needs to be repeated ‘as is’ within or across documents and other assets, such as those that contain legal information, health and safety provision, disclaimers or chemical substance compositions, to name just a few.
Best practice is to keep these locked chunks as small and specific as possible to simplify their integration into various documents and assets. Verbatim content reuse allows:
- Content to be updated quickly across various assets
- Easy tracking and control of reused content
- Documents to follow agreed standards and formats
- Enhanced consistency, accuracy and uniformity of content
Derivative content reuse
To help ensure a high level of content reuse, most organizations will allow derivative content reuse. This is when content chunks aren't locked and can therefore be edited by authors. Making edits creates a new chunk of content. Authors reuse derivative content to create new documents from content components that already exist, modified to suit the new document or other asset.
The newly created (or derivative) content chunk is a ‘child’ of the ‘parent content’ or original chunk. This parent-child relationship is recorded by the CCMS, which notifies the author of the derivative content if the original content gets modified. The author can then decide whether or not to incorporate the changes into the derivative content.
Derivative content can be created using content variables and conditions in your publication, or by editing content manually. A translation is also considered to be derivative content
Derivative content reuse allows:
• Quick authoring of content across documents with different purposes and audiences
• More flexibility for authors to adapt the content without control being lost
• Long-term consistency by tracking the relationship between the original and the derivative content
The benefits of controlled content reuse
The main benefits of controlled content reuse are lower content development efforts and reduced costs. As mentioned earlier, independent research identified some striking results achieved by organizations using the Tridion Docs CCMS.
ROI with Tridion Docs CCMS over five years
More agile, lower-cost content development
Using a CCMS can help organizations drive down content development costs. Unlike a traditional authoring environment, in which content is typically created sequentially, SCA and CCMS tools enable authors, reviewers and subject-matter experts (SMEs) to work in a more agile way and create content components independently and in parallel. If translation is required, individual components can be translated as soon as they're ready. Once all content components have been approved, they can be assembled into the final publication.
Comparison of traditional and CCMS-led content creation
If copy changes are required down the line, only the affected components need to be modified, enabling faster production of updated publications. For example, a product may require only 5% of the information in its manual to be revised. The new version of the manual (including any translations) can reuse all the unchanged information, leaving authors to create just the 5% of content that's new.
With controlled content reuse through a CCMS, the cost of producing the new manual can be dramatically reduced and the savings allocated elsewhere in the business. The authoring effort is similarly reduced and the new manual can be published more quickly.
Giving time back to authors, editors and SMEs
As well as authors and editors, content development typically involves SMEs (technical contributors) at various stages, such as explaining concepts or validating what's been written.
Content creation effort by stakeholder type at each content development phase
As expected, content authors and technical contributors spend more of their time creating and updating content, while editors and reviewers are more involved in the review process.
The independent research shows the efficiency gains enabled by the CCMS at each stage of the content development process. Content is created and updated, on average, 11% more quickly by authors and technical contributors, while content reviewers and editors can save 7–8% of their time.
Content development efficiencies enabled by Tridion Docs CCMS
Content reuse up from 3% to 32%
When publications need to be made available in multiple versions across several geographies and languages, things can get complicated and content development costs can soar. Enabling controlled content reuse can drive costs down by as much as five-fold when reaching a fourth variant of the publication.
The research shows that the average cumulative efficiencies reduced the time spent creating content by over 31% while saving $111m over five years for a typical large enterprise.
Cost savings with content reuse in relation to the number of publication variants
Lower translation and localization costs
Content reuse can reduce translation and localization costs when coupled with a suitable translation and localization solution. Organizations that don't have to worry about skyrocketing translation costs can choose to expand the number of languages they publish in.
In the study, one organization using Tridion Docs CCMS for content creation and reuse increased the number of languages they offered from 30 to 90 over the course of five years because they cut translation costs by a whopping 80%.
Working with this kind of structured content can simplify adoption of translation memories (TMs). Once a content component has been translated, the translated version is saved in the TM. Future translations can be done faster, as only new content needs to be translated and incorporated into the TM. Integrating machine translation can further accelerate the process, with new chunks translated using AI, then passed to human reviewers for validation.
Optimizing the translation process with structured content
Are you looking to benefit from controlled content reuse?
Explore how authors, technical reviewers, SMEs, publication and process managers can reduce content creation costs and effort and speed publication through controlled content reuse with Tridion Docs.
Sabrina Herlo
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