Client Praise for TPA

TPA worked closely with Premier Fabrication, Inc. to create an assembly and operations manual for their Barge Spout. This product is used to convey grain from a riverside grain storage facility into a barge at the river’s edge.

This is the feedback they received from one of their customers, “The Operational Manual is awesome. Good work to your design team. This is one of the better assembly manuals I’ve seen in our industry for quite some time. GROWMARK.”

Importance of Illustrations

Many companies, when it comes to their products and brand identity, spend a lot of hours, money, and/or manpower in creating their image. If you look at large farm machinery, construction equipment, or auto manufacturers, you can usually tell who built the product by the color scheme, design features, or product markings. And the distinction doesn’t stop with the actual product. If you open their owner’s manuals, parts catalogs, or marketing materials, you will see their documentation has a distinctive look while still following industry standards. Corporate branding uses specific colors, a certain type face, layout style, or even illustrations that are created using a consistent style. Large companies have the revenue and manpower to build a consistent brand from the product to the documentation. Now, how can small to mid-sized companies achieve this same brand recognition without the available resources of a large company?  

The quality of a product is not determined by the size of the company.  Many small companies produce products as good as, if not better, than some of the Fortune 100 and 500 giants.  So how do you overcome your limited resources or manpower?  This is where Technical Publication Associates (TPA) can help expand your resources.  We have 20+ years in writing, designing, and illustrating owner’s manuals, parts catalogs, assembly or installation instructions, and service manuals.  We take pride in helping small manufacturers create effective, clear, and concise documentation for their products.  With our large client base, we are able to provide smaller companies with an off-site technical documentation department on an as-needed basis.  In addition to our technical writers, we have technical illustrators that can produce illustrations which give your manuals or marketing materials a distinctive look and feel.  Working together we can begin to create brand loyalty for your products.

The illustration examples show variations of a product from a simple line drawing that can be used in a parts book to a complex photo-realistic drawing possibly used for marketing.  Each style of drawing has its own unique ability to promote your brand at an affordable cost.

Nicklaus Hernan, Art Director / Illustrator TPA, Inc.

#illustrations

Adding consumer confidence in your product

A quality technical manual, such as an operator's manual or parts book, can provide your consumers with an added level of confidence in your product. However, at the same time, high quality also needs to be engineered into the product. We believe that a quality manual can make the consumer realize they have purchased a high-quality product, even though they may not be able to see the quality. In most cases, the quality of a product cannot be seen from the outside. We can see the shell of the product looks good, but will it live up to the marketing sales pitch? That is where good product support literature will add value to your product. On the other hand, the best-engineered product can be perceived as poorly designed, if the product support literature is poorly done.

Over the past 20+ years of business, we have had many clients with very well-designed, well-built products. Most of these clients had poorly produced product support literature at one time. This type of literature can make consumers wonder if these manuals were done in someone's basement-basically an afterthought. So what do we, the consumer, see when we look at poorly produced product literature? We see a company that doesn't seem to care about quality. If they do not have enough pride to sell their product in their support literature, they may have that same philosophy in the design and manufacturing of the product.

Quality is something that is perceived by each individual. So, if you're going to design and manufacture quality products, why not put the same effort into designing quality product support literature.

Notice that earlier we stated, "doesn't seem to care." In defense of small businesses, of which we are one, many times the product support literature is poorly done for a variety of reasons. First, you may not see the need or the value in spending money on manuals. Sometimes manuals are considered an afterthought. They're needed, but, "no great loss if we don't have one." Secondly, you may not know how to produce a manual. Many times something is thrown together to meet the letter-of-the-law. When the manual is done, you say, "all right, now let's get back to the real work-engineering." Thirdly, you may not have the time to do the work properly. There are only so many hours in a day and when you wear your sales and marketing, engineering, human resource, accounting, personnel, and chief-cook-and-bottle-washer hats, you just don't have any time left in the day to write a manual.

That's where we come in. We are trying to make business owners aware of another alternative-using our company (tpa). We combine our knowledge of many different products into one source. Now your company can have manuals that add value to your products using our technical writers and illustrators. In the long run, the expense of creating quality manuals is cost effective because it gives you more time for internal work and we provide the resources and manpower to do the job correctly and efficiently. That's why we're here, to help you produce product support literature that will strengthen your product's image.

Steve Nichol, President and Co-founder of TPA, Inc.

#consumerconfidence