What Bill Murray and Text Comparison Have in Common
In highly regulated industries such as pharmaceuticals, medical devices, consumer goods and chemical, ensuring correct labeling content is extremely important as one mistake can cause harm to patients or customer and could cost millions of €/$. Because of this, highly skilled employees are employed to avoid these occurrences, and often spend hours comparing labeling files with information about leaflets, labels, manuals, folding boxes etc.
These employees spend valuable time comparing Word files to PDF files or versions of PDF files. After spending 5 years studying, can you imagine how de-motivating and un-stimulating this could be?
What this reminds me of is the movie Groundhog Day. In this movie Bill Murray wakes up every day to live the same day over and over again. Because yes, I forgot to mention that usually the same file is reviewed 3, 4 or even 5 times! Although in the movie Bill Murray learns to play piano and is finally able to win over Andie MacDowell, nothing as nice will happen by proofreading the same file pair over and over again. Furthermore Bill Murray had nothing else to do, whereas typically in Pharma, Regulatory Affairs are constantly dealing with increasing workloads and the pressure to keep up with the new regulations.
In the end, Bill’s un-ending day is over and life goes on, but for a proofreader the job is never finished. This may sound like agony to some, but on a positive note, proofreaders have tools that can help. They can decide to use a content comparison software such as the Text Verification Tool (TVT) to get things done faster, quicker, safer and go home early for those piano lessons!