In our previous blog, “Unplanned Downtime: Respond Rather than React,” we shared insight from organizations we have worked with to help others prevent mistakes they experienced with downtime. These mistakes include not having a plan for when downtime occurs, or workers not having access to the right tools and knowledge to solve problems independently. What we learned from working with other manufacturers is that most of their problems can be solved if companies can find a way to help their workers or teams be more autonomous. But how can you make your newest worker autonomous with all the things they have yet to learn?
Our first advice is to document your key knowledge. Many of the organizations we spoke with have their key knowledge stuck in the brain of their senior engineer, their supervisors, or someone retiring next month. As soon as they leave, that knowledge leaves with them. The current training methods don’t give business owners enough time to train their newer employees to know all that the retiree knows.
Although documenting all your key knowledge sounds like an epic task, it doesn’t have to be. The first step doesn’t require you spending a penny. You can start by:
- Identify key knowledge for your organization’s operational needs
- Find out where the knowledge exists
- Document this information
These 3 steps will help you secure a headstart with your documentation. If you want to do it best right out the gate, we recommend documenting in digital formats. Writing pages and pages of Word documents is time consuming, but it gives your workers a medium they can scroll on and use a “find” feature to search for a specific section, and this is a step in the right direction.
If you’re in a position that budgets for training expenses, we recommend documenting using a system that allows your experts to perform quality control of the documentation easily, while allowing your workers access to that knowledge on-demand, at their fingertips.
And that’s SuperDoc.
SuperDoc exists to help organizations document key knowledge, work history, and important processes so it can all be accessed by workers at any time, and reduce how often a technician would be called on. Imagine your production worker solving for downtime on their own, identifying the cause of the problem with an iPad, and following step-by-step instructions to get equipment back on and operating. You would already be decreasing downtime by at least 10% even if the worker still had to call the technician to fix the equipment.
If the identified problem is something that your production worker can’t fix, that would be something worth calling your technician for. Organizations lose the most potential revenue on just waiting; waiting for the facilities and maintenance technician to be available, waiting on the supplier’s technical support to get there, waiting for the equipment to be repaired.
Now, if you’re not one to wait, our SuperDoc Test Program is open and we’re taking applicants. You can learn more about the benefits of signing up to test SuperDoc here.
SuperDoc is solving for the many times people have told us: “We have to fly our expert across the country just to push a green button.” They lose money, and their customers lose money.
Our advice is to be innovative and find ways to be prepared for the unplanned, by taking action ahead of time rather than reacting with no time to think.
We hope this was helpful for you. If you want to read more about what other organizations are doing to be proactive, our next blog talks about inefficient training methods and additional solutions for your company’s success in 2021.
