The governance upgrade that changed how Grundfos delivers technical documentation

Grundfos is a global leader in advanced pump solutions, delivering energy-efficient water technologies to customers in 56 countries. Their pumps support everything from supplying clean water to Antarctic research teams, to irrigating Dutch tulips, to cooling Egyptian hotels. With over 20,000 employees and a presence across multiple industries, Grundfos relies on accurate, multilingual technical documentation to support its customers worldwide.

For seven years, the company relied on an on-premise, DITA-based CCMS – essentially a plugin to a web CMS. While it provided some publishing capabilities, it was never designed for complex, data-heavy technical documentation. Essential functions were missing, forcing Grundfos to build numerous in-house tools. These stopgaps introduced technical debt, made the system fragile, and created a serious barrier to upgrades.

Even after thorough pre-release testing, production updates would sometimes fail, breaking key functionality. Eventually, the risk became so high that the team stopped updating the system altogether.

Instability was another constant frustration. Frequent restarts, unresponsive performance, and inconsistent behaviour eroded trust among authors. Worse, there was no reliable way to track changes to reused content, meaning a topic could be altered without the author’s knowledge, potentially impacting approved documents that were ready for release.

Translation management also suffered. With over 40 languages to manage, the system frequently produced duplicate or missing translations, increasing the risk of errors and slowing delivery to market.

The documentation team knew they needed a stable, purpose-built solution that could reduce technical debt, enforce governance and traceability, and support a more efficient, consistent way of working.

When Grundfos began evaluating alternatives, the team knew exactly what they were looking for: a stable, cloud-based platform with all the essential features built in, so they could retire their in-house tools and reduce technical debt. Governance and traceability were non-negotiable. The new system needed to make every content change visible, controlled, and auditable, ensuring approved documentation could never be altered without intent. Compliance with EU data protection laws was also essential.

RWS Tridion Docs quickly stood out. Unlike their previous system, it was designed from the ground up for technical communication. From the first demonstration, the architecture impressed the team: robust metadata and property handling, mandatory check-in/check-out, and embedded workflows that enforce good content governance as a matter of course.

Grundfos ran a pilot project to prove the fit. Early sessions with RWS confirmed the team’s belief that they’d found the right tool. But moving from a loosely controlled system to one with strict versioning and workflow meant changing established habits.

For example, in the old environment, authors might add certain content after translation. In Tridion Docs, content must be final before translation begins, so those changes had to be planned earlier. This required rethinking workflows and adjusting mindsets.

“It’s made by people who understand technical communicators, and it evolves with their needs.” Regina Fichter, Head of Technical Communication, Grundfos

During rollout, success would mean a stable, fully available system with no “firefighting”. Authors needed to trust the platform, knowing exactly which version of content was in each publication and where that content was reused.

Over the longer term, Grundfos set their sights on measurable gains:

• Higher content reuse to shorten time-to-market
• Reduced translation errors and duplication
• Greater process efficiency by removing reliance on custom tools
• Future-ready publishing across multiple channels and formats

The biggest challenge was adapting to Tridion Docs’ built-in governance. Authors who were used to freely changing content now had to follow structured workflows, and every late-stage change required a new version – and a new translation cycle. While initially frustrating, the team came to see this as a safeguard, not a limitation.

Today, Grundfos is confident they have a platform that works with their processes rather than against them, and that can scale to support their content ambitions for the coming years.

Even before the full rollout was complete, Tridion Docs was showing a noticeable improvement in day-to-day operations. The most significant change was stability: the team had yet to encounter the monthly restarts or failed PDF generations that had been common in the old system. Support requests about performance issues dropped, freeing up more time for authors to work on content instead of dealing with technical interruptions. While the rollout was still ongoing, these early signs pointed to a more reliable, predictable platform.

The second major win was governance. Versioning and baselines gave authors complete visibility into every content change, and – crucially – control over when and how those changes appeared in other documents. That meant no more silent, unapproved alterations creeping into published materials.

“With Tridion Docs, those kinds of errors simply cannot happen anymore. The versioning and baselines make it obvious which content you’re using, and it won’t update somewhere else unless you deliberately choose the new version.”  Eva Nauerth, Senior Content Engineer, Grundfos

Migration also brought unexpected benefits. The team gained greater visibility into duplicates and mismatches between source and translated topics. While this required authors to version and retranslate affected content, it gave them the oversight needed to improve quality inside the CCMS.