Successfully making the digital leap with Yonder

© Swissgrid

Better information management for critical infrastructures

Swissgrid’s network control center operates 24/7 to balance energy supply and demand throughout Switzerland’s transmission grid.

Although their own multi-language documentation (German, French, Italian, English) sets out the procedures its operators must follow, the processes themselves are governed by national law, other industry-specific regulations, and international agreements.

The team had previously managed its core documentation and additional content by means of PDF and Word files, accessible to employees via a dedicated SharePoint site.

But Swissgrid recognized that it needed to rethink the way it handled its documentation, with the clear objective of streamlining content and presenting reliable information in a more user-friendly manner.

The challenge: less complexity, greater clarity

Having decided to make the leap from PDF-based to fully digital content, Swissgrid required a sustainable solution that would provide easy access to all information, simplify the handling of its multi-language documentation and satisfy BCM requirements.

As well as allowing users to locate the right information at the right time, content was to be displayed dynamically, only showing information that was truly relevant.

“In the past, keeping our documentation alive and engaging our users in collaborative revision processes was somewhat challenging,” acknowledges Head of Operations Improvement Franziska Zuber. Ensuring that information could be easily reviewed and revised was a top priority. The Swissgrid team wanted users to be able to initiate improvements or corrections instantly, join discussions and approve pending change requests. To encourage them to update their documentation more frequently, the workflows needed to be intuitive while always providing a seamless audit and revision trail.

The organization was looking for an application that could link content directly to the underlying regulatory material and notify stakeholders whenever it changed.

The team also wanted to be able to compile reports on how the regulatory requirements were reflected in their process documents.

Due to the documentation’s operational significance, the chosen solution would have to safeguard system and data integrity from undesired actions by users. Swissgrid’s stringent business continuity requirements meant that all the information would have to be available offline, ideally with the option to print well-formatted hard copies in a worst-case scenario.

“Being subject to Swiss procurement law and the related WTO-specific tender processes forced us to carefully specify our needs in terms of managing process documentation for operators in the future,” says Swissgrid Procurement Manager Ernst Fischer. “It certainly provided us with an incentive to pause, identify the relevant gaps and analyze in detail what we truly needed to improve our situation sustainably.”

The solution: streamlined, user-friendly processes that simplify compliance

Defining requirements

“Only after we had improved the quality of our existing content, did we set out to evaluate possible solutions for handling our documentation,” states Technical Documentation Specialist Céline Haederli.

Swissgrid surveyed operators about their expectations and held a series of dedicated workshops to get a better understanding of their requirements.

Discussions focused on how the team could make the content of its manuals more useful to operators. IT specialists were also consulted on what was possible in terms of the company’s IT architecture and standards, particularly regarding cybersecurity.

Swissgrid then used this feedback to draw up a detailed list of requirements and 10 use cases that would serve to evaluate the bids received in the tender process. These covered two main aspects:

1. Ease of locating the right information, based on the end-user‘s role and task
2. Feasibility from a regulatory point of view, including audit-related considerations

Yonder – an all-in-one software-as-a-service solution (SaaS) – was considered the most advantageous bid in terms of quality and price. “In Yonder, we have found a reliable partner that not only offers an appropriate solution, but also provides the services required to ensure proper implementation and long-term project success,” adds Franziska Zuber.

Yonder’s tailor-made solution

Swissgrid and Yonder held several workshops to jointly develop the concept for managing Swissgrid’s information.

“These provided us with the opportunity to share our expertise and ensure that the system’s features were properly aligned with the customer’s specific use cases,” Yonder’s Chief Business Officer, Marc Rauch, elaborates. “Swissgrid’s groundwork facilitated this process significantly and was well worth the effort,” Marc continues, acknowledging that it enabled a relatively seamless transition to the new system.

The result was a coherent content-handling concept, with document-specific revision and approval workflows. It was now possible to transform Swissgrid’s legacy content into a format better suited to its objectives.

The Yonder team then began working alongside Swissgrid to refine the content and functionality of the solution.

Displaying the right information at the right time

To allow users to only view relevant content, Swissgrid set up several roles and filters. The “roles” give users access to all the information required to carry out their specific duties. Used in combination with the “filters”, they enable them to quickly retrieve the most critical information needed in each time-sensitive scenario (e.g., a power plant failure with consequences for the national supply).

As figure 1 shows, this is made possible by Yonder’s modular approach to documentation management. Users can tag discrete units of content – even as small as a single sentence or a table row – with additional information and then selectively display the content based on these tags.

Swissgrid’s revision and approval processes

Several document-specific workflows ensure that revisions are coordinated by specifying who is permitted to make change requests at this stage and who can join discussions and take action later on.

These are even capable of branching out dynamically. Swissgrid uses this feature to further classify incoming change requests for certain documents (e.g., as “major” or “editorial”). The workflow then identifies and invites the relevant stakeholders to participate in the subsequent steps.

All revision-related processes, from the creation of the initial change request to final approval, are executed entirely in Yonder in a way that is both user-friendly and transparent while always ensuring a comprehensive audit trail.

Managing multi-language documentation

Swissgrid manages the same information in four different languages: German, French, Italian and English. Although displayed in separate documents, users must be able to switch easily between them. Yonder enables links to be created at the information module level that instantly redirect users to the relevant passage in the desired language.

Swissgrid also benefits from a specific workflow that enables it to synchronize revisions between languages. It defines a master language for each document, which then serves as the primary language for making changes. Once a change is marked as “Ready for Publish”, the system automatically alerts the user to make the same change in the other languages.

Compliance-related information management

Yonder can monitor both external and internal dependencies between content items. Swissgrid uses this feature to link information in its documents directly to the underlying regulations and standards, which it manages internally. Whenever these are amended, the system triggers an automatic change request for the linked content, as shown in figure 3.

Streamlining Swissgrid’s documentation

Yonder allows Swissgrid to streamline its content by reusing information without having to physically duplicate it between documents.

All documents are automatically updated whenever a change is made to the original (see figure 4). This eliminates potential conflicts of information and ensures there are no more outdated duplicates scattered across Swissgrid’s documentation landscape.

Next steps: continued collaboration to refine the solution

The teams will now continue to co-create and test additional features to refine and optimize the solution.

In response to operator feedback, for example, Yonder is working closely with the Swissgrid team to create personalized revision notifications. This will not only save users time by ensuring that they only receive role-specific information, but a “click to accept” confirmation prompt will also provide an audit trail for compliance purposes (see figure 5 for a generic example).

This represents another step closer towards an efficient, transparent, and personalized content management solution that is perfectly tailored to Swissgrid’s evolving business needs.