NWDC cut timelines for the review process by 50%
Ideagen PleaseReview is unlike any document management system you have tried before. It is as easy to use as Microsoft Word, but allows reviewers to work simultaneously on the same document and eliminates the most labor intensive aspects associated with structured document reviews.
The Challenge
Navy Doctrine Library System (NDLS) found themselves needing a better tool to develop and revise Navy doctrine.
Frustrated by reading through lengthy emails searching for relevant comments amid the background clutter of administrative remarks, NDLS needed an off-the-shelf collaboration process to increase productivity and save time.
Navy Doctrine Library System (NDLS) had the capability for uploading Word documents for online review and commenting. The system was designed to maximize collaboration during the review process, but the document import process was clunky and labor-intensive requiring multiple manual entries and many steps that took days to complete.
Ideagen PleaseReview was the perfect solution for NWDC as it both increased efficiency and saved essential time for the company.
How did Ideagen PleaseReview help NWDC?
Uploading a document now takes less than five minutes and requires very little additional formatting work. “We wanted to find a capability that would expedite the document review process, to make it a lot simpler,” explained Robert Wilhelm, NWDC Publishing Manager.
“Now stakeholders can work on the same document at the same time which increases productivity and saves time. The author can see all the comments, accepting or rejecting changes, and the software automatically merges all the accepted changes into the document.”
By making the document available for review in a secure, controlled, browser-based environment, Ideagen PleaseReview allows everybody to see each others contributions, ensuring a more open and transparent process in a simultaneous manner
This means an end to multiple emails and attachments, version incompatibility, style and formatting issues and duplication of effort.
In fact, the time spent reviewing documents has been dramatically reduced, which means the final document is completed faster, and the collaboration features result in more accurate, higher quality results.
The workflow is simpler and in real time. That has been our goal with the document review process – to make the process faster for the warfighter so documents can be updated as needed instead of waiting for the mandatory three-year requirement because the process was so painful before.
Using the previous system, the author had to wait for feedback from all stakeholders and then painstakingly go through each comment, cutting and pasting text for accepted changes. “Changes had to be modified manually. It was tedious and timec-onsuming,” Wilhelm said. “PleaseReview displays a history of changes and comments so one critical comment is not a shows-topper. It also allows comments to be categorized so that a reviewer can filter out administrative remarks, for example, which is very useful for reviewing staffs.”
PleaseReview, a software that is about half the cost of the previous system used, has cut NWDC’s review timeline in half.
Now, authors do not have to wait until the deadline for commenting has passed to begin adjudicating comments. Instead, reviews can be made in real-time in an energetic and innovative collaborative environment.
Administrative changes can be made offline, for example, to conform to the formats of Navy doctrine, instructions or manuals for standard fonts, chapters and appendices.
Commands also have the option to conduct tiered reviews to accommodate the military chain of command, and sub-reviews allow comments to be staffed privately within each reviewing command until they are authorized for release to the author and other reviewers.
In addition to Navy warfare publications and instructions, PleaseReview is ideal for planning documents: NWDC’s experimentation group is using PleaseReview to collaborate on the schedule for the next series of experiments to be hosted by the command in the Navy Center for Advanced Modeling and Simulation.
Benefits
Increases productivity with reviewers working on the same document at the same time
Improves transparency by letting reviewers see and respond to each other
Removes bottlenecks with a complete record of all comments and changes
Cut timelines for the review process in half to between one to three weeks and has cut the operating costs of the previous system in half
Your organisation can dramatically cut the time spent reviewing documents with Ideagen PleaseReview.
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