Subscription Update for Manufacturing
Jinfo Blog

By Elizabeth Trudell

Abstract

Manufacturing companies make up a significant portion of FreePint's customer base, and we work closely with our customers in this industry to produce resources tuned to their needs for information strategy, procurement, skill development and collaboration with other parts of their businesses. We highlight recent items of interest to this market sector from FreePint's Content, Community and Consulting.

Item

Content (Articles, Reports and Webinars)

Many large manufacturing firms with extensive product lines are deploying repositories to improve their ability to manage digital content. A recent case study discusses one company’s planning process for implementing a digital asset management system. The case study helps kick off our new FreePint Topic Series "Making Information Visible". Another recent article in this series offer guidance on building a proactive plan to engage users.

As content is shared more freely across the enterprise, copyright management becomes more challenging. The Copyright Clearance Center aims to more closely align document delivery and copyright management through their acquisition of Infotrieve.  Additional best practices for copyright management are training users to adhere to copyright terms and managing risk through good procedures.

A common challenge for information centres in manufacturing environments is getting engineers to take advantage of premium content resources and engage in use of collaboration tools to drive product and process innovation. This theme is explored in several recent articles which address:

• Key drivers and blockers of collaboration in the enterprise
• A new tool for improving team communication
• Tips on what to avoid when implementing social tools.

With so many systems to assess, there is valuable insight in this recorded webinar on best practices for tracking a wide range of technology topics. And, you can still register for this upcoming webinar entitled User Behaviour and Visibility.

When delivering information to engineers and others, presenting it in concise format that enables fast assimilation is key. Get useful tips from this article on presenting research results.

Coming soon in FreePint will be a set of articles including the results of original research on ebook usage in corporate environments. Read more about this project here, and watch for that content starting in March 2015.

Community

To create a forum for information managers with similar challenges, FreePint has started offering industry-focused Communities of Practice sessions. One of the first of these is for those in what we call "tangible goods" industries - anything dealing with the physical world. In our experience, these organisations ask similar questions about value, information usage and understanding users, compared to their counterparts in professional services firms like finance and law, but what constitutes a "good" answer looks very different to those used to working with the tangible world.

Information managers in manufacturing should find the Strategies for Information Managers in Tangible Goods Industries session in April on-target and practical to their needs.

Information managers at manufacturing companies participated in the on-site Communities of Practice sessions on Determining, Discussing and Measuring Value which occurred in October 2014. These events focused on defining criteria to identify and define value concepts and how to create a value statement.  

A Community of Practice teleconference session held in December 2014 featured discussion amongst information centre managers on evaluating alternatives for news sources for use in supporting in-depth research, to supplement scientific and technical information.

Consulting

Several customers added Consulting-level services to their accounts with the start of the new year, including a few in manufacturing. As a result, we're kicking off new projects to support:

• Creating global insight around usage of third-party content
• Engaging with key stakeholders in IT and R&D departments
• Evaluating the IT-related needs specific to an information centre, and then advocating for those needs with senior-level decision-makers.

A FreePint Subscription at the Content level gives access to all FreePint articles, reports and webinars, at the Community level gives access to all FreePint Communities of Practice (as well as all FreePint Content), and at the Consulting level adds a credit for up to six hours of annual consulting time. Find out more.

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