The Brief & Background
The lack of an effective spell check was causing massive amounts of extra work and a disconnected workflow, placing a large amount of non-job description responsibilities on the legal and regulatory teams.
The process
A marketing piece would be made and approved by the Global marketing department and the content owners. The document would then need to go into the Document Control Review (DRC) process. In DRC, the Legal and Regulatory representatives would review the document and find spelling errors, trademark errors, product names (approx. 1,750 products) and language issues switching from U.S. English to U.K. English. The file would then go back to the Global Marketing department to be edited. The file would then need to be reviewed again and signed off by all parties. This process stemmed from a non-functional spell check, rendered useless by the industry-specific terms, company trademarks and versions of the English language.
What I did
I built a new dictionary from a previously approved product catalog for both U.K. and U.S. English. The dictionary additions were built from 1,500 words with 656 case sensitive words. I validated the dictionaries and built a process to add them to Adobe InDesign and the Microsoft Office suite. After I ensured the updated spell checks worked, I took the dictionary to IT and together we built a patch that was pushed to Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. as an update to all of Roche Tissue Diagnostics employee computers.
