that his company offered a long list of content production services, but the automotive world was evolving away from print.
McGinnis says Tweddle already works with almost every auto manufacturer that sells products in the United States. Tweddle’s bread and butter is still creating owner manuals and other materials for the auto industry (now, of course, from digital files). In fact, it was while working on a manual that Andrew Tweddle says he had an “a-ha moment.” As the company was designing the program, he wondered who was handling the translation of error messages into non-English languages. “I realized there is all this owner communication around service that needed to be managed.”
These days, Tweddle is working with Nuance and others to provide a host of communication-management services. As McGinnis points out, cars work with many different connection carriers. Tweddle makes sure the content carried over those connections, like text from an owner’s manual, has been vetted by auto manufacturers. “Any topic we write about goes through a pretty rigorous process—legal, engineering,” he says. “That’s where we come in and add a lot of value.”
The name of the game now, Tweddle and McGinnis say, is event-based communications, where the car is constantly pushing data back to the cloud. Take vehicle maintenance, for instance. If your car’s check engine light comes on, Tweddle’s software can read data from the car’s sensors and immediately take steps remotely, like identifying the root cause of the problem, ordering parts, and scheduling a time for the car to be repaired at the dealership.
To produce a new vehicle, it’s generally an 18-36 month cycle, McGinnis says, with Tweddle getting involved during three steps: integration of content, validation, and vetting. It’s currently working with two manufacturers on information-management technology slated to go in 2016 vehicle models.
“The auto industry and software industry are very out of sync,” Tweddle adds. “We internalize that challenge. Our customers find that culture clash so significant that they can’t work together. We’ve experienced it internally, so we try to insulate our customers. We’ve evolved to something that wasn’t even here 20 years ago.”
