GRIPS Prelude

For any company to achieve operational efficiencies necessary to thrive in today's commercial sector, streamlining and synchronizing cross-functional operations around current, accurate product information is a core requirement.

STAR Group's "GRIPS" is a comprehensive technical communications platform that provides a single-source solution, which streamlines communication flows while substantially increasing information quality. GRIPS' single-source nature assimilates all of the technical product information as it arises in all of the various functional silos, providing a common contextual knowledge fabric for the company. In doing so, GRIPS enables companies to fully capture and leverage product knowledge in its entirety.

Just as ERP systems forced companies to look hard at and modify their production flows, GRIPS educates or leads companies in looking at their Product Information Life Cycle as a distinct, but integrated activity.

As such, GRIPS facilitates the change of organizational constructs to be consistent with a comprehensive process reengineering plan's policies and procedures by shifting the focus of "Tech Pubs" from being producers of documentation to being facilitators of accurate mission critical information, while not disrupting natural information flows.

So, rather than focusing on documentation, with its inherent errors, it is better to focus on structuring product information in a manner that enables accommodation of any future information delivery requirement, and doing so with an infrastructure that enables people to more efficiently perform in their roles and responsibilities.

In other words, it is time to regard "documentation" as an information output, rather than the method for information storage. What is needed now and even more so in the future is consistent, current and accurate product information that is maintained in a single-source solution, capable of delivering information in a multitude of formats to accommodate all information users' needs (i.e. various documentation types) and environments, which, in fact, are changing constantly.