Chrystal Software Automates Document creation and publishing For Automotive Industry -- DaimlerChrysler AG Reduced Content Authoring Costs by 50 Percent

    SAN DIEGO--Jan. 26, 2001--Chrystal Software, a Xerox New Enterprise Company, can revolutionize the way the automotive industry manages documents and data - and industry giants such as DaimlerChrysler and Fiat are demonstrating how.
    DaimlerChrysler and Fiat S.p.A. showed tangible improvement in reducing costs and decreasing overhead after recently implementing Chrystal's flagship document management program, Astoria(R).
    Fiat S.p.A. is a multibillion-dollar company headquartered in Turin, Italy, and best known for its small, sporty cars. It incorporates 888 companies in 62 countries and employs more than 240,000 people. In addition to automobiles, it produces airplanes, ships, trains, agricultural tractors, construction machinery and other industrial products.
    Not surprisingly, Fiat placed huge demands upon its document creation and management systems. With offices and production facilities around the world, each generating reams of critical data, Fiat required a system that permitted flexible but precise communication between distant points and had the capacity to design and produce a range of product-specific documents and precise, technical manuals. Accurate language translation was also important since Fiat serves customers using dozens of languages.
    Astoria from Chrystal Software met the challenge. Fiat implemented an integrated document-management solution called Global Gate, which uses as its foundation Astoria's object-oriented database design. Fiat is now able to create reusable information components that are expected to substantially reduce authoring costs and production time for the millions of pages of data that Fiat produces or revises each year.
    Beyond that, Astoria offers SGML and XML capabilities that will allow Fiat to grow and evolve in business since the company can now distribute manuals over the Internet, via company intranets or extranets, on CD-ROM, or on paper.
    Meanwhile, Chrystal Software is helping customize service manuals for MCC smart GmbH, a subsidiary of DaimlerChrysler AG, which is marketing a new, ultra-small automobile called "the smart car."
    The idea behind the smart car (just 8 feet long) is unprecedented. MCC wanted to deliver a car that was highly customizable, but could be produced within a few days of order. Plus, the company wanted subsequent car service to be very "smart," with garages able to automatically recognize individual cars and their particular customizations.
    To achieve these goals, MCC minimized the number of suppliers and created an online system that creates exactly the documentation required at the time of service for each car. More radically, the company decided not to produce service manuals, but to create instead pools of reusable content.
    It works like this: Instead of creating one static, quickly out-of-date service manual, MCC generates thousands of bits of data or objects that can be added or deleted to create a unique but standardized document for each car. As a result, authoring costs are measurably reduced while production efficiencies are increased.
    "Using Chrystal software, we have reduced the authoring costs for an automotive workshop manual by 50 percent," said Jean Hamilton, SPX Valley Forge Technical Information Services, a Chrystal Software partner and solution integrator.
    MCC went further by adopting XML/SGML standards and storing its database in a highly adaptable content management system that will ensure maximum flexibility in the future.
    Headquartered in San Diego, Chrystal Software focuses on delivering high-performance content management for Web-based applications, as well as traditional publishing and high-end, single-source authoring environments.