Customer story: P&I Design Ltd

How P&I Design Keeps their Manuals Online with FlippingBook Publisher

What use does an engineering design company that designs plants and oil depot storages get from digital publishing software? Dave Ransome, Chairman at P&I Design, can tell you all about it.

Challenge

Apart from helping their customers in engineering and designing chemical plants and storages, P&I Design informs them about the chemical industry and provides them with 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 the equipment 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 mailed a revised drawing to our clients, chances were that it would not end up in the manual, but sit on someone’s desk.

P&I Design needed to create an online documentation system for their clients, where the company could update any document, and the changes would immediately be seen by the clients. Also, their new documents had to look good, just like the paper manual.

Search for Solution

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

We needed a solution that could handle big files, structure them, make them load fast and look good.

Solution

To improve the customer experience with documentation, P&I Design decided to enhance their manuals with FlippingBook Publisher. It turned out that, unlike the PDF format, FlippingBook offered several important features, such as pre‑set Table of Contents created from bookmarks in the PDF, custom design, and fast access to documents of any size.

Even though their documents are hosted on Flippingbook cloud, P&I Design makes sure that all the information remains confidential.

We create a login name and password for every client on our site for their online documentation. They can log in to our website and see an index page with the URLs to the documents on FlippingBook cloud that are relevant to them.

The new format was meant to ensure the clients’ comfort, but P&I Design ran into some resistance at first. One of their clients even called the tool a bit gimmicky and said they’d rather have “the old docmonster”. But FlippingBook is a flexible tool, and after some tweaking 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 the screen. We also turn the page flipping sound off.

Even their sceptical clients are now happy with the product. One of them can’t wait till they bring all his documentation to FlippingBook, which P&I Design is in the process of doing.

FlippingBook turned out to be a great solution not just for the company’s clients, but for their engineers as well. When they go out on site visits, they use their iPads with FlippingBook documents on them.

Now, our engineers always have the most recent documentation when they are on site, even when they don’t have access to a computer.

Results

Having implemented FlippingBook as a primary format for their documentation, P&I Design achieved their goals: they provided their clients with good‑quality, nice documentation that loads quickly and is easy to navigate around.

Any client can get into their online documentation from any device and from anywhere in the world. The other beauty of FlippingBook is that we only keep one document copy that we control and update. So the clients always work with the copy that we want them to work with, as opposed to how we handled the issue before. Now we can give them a manual when it’s finished. It also forces us to keep our documentation up‑to‑date.