This multinational corporation operates in numerous fields of industrial manufacturing, including worker safety, health care, consumer goods, and other verticals.
They’ve had a loyal workforce, with many of their experienced employees remaining engaged on the frontline for over thirty years. Each of whom accumulated invaluable expertise.
But as a significant portion of their veteran workforce approached retirement, a new challenge emerged. With increasingly sophisticated technology being incorporated into frontline production processes, everything from preventive maintenance tasks to line changeovers requires more time and knowledge to complete.
Machine operating procedures were hard to understand and created long training times. Documentation involved a lot of reading, but didn’t leverage standards that encouraged visuals supplemented with clear, concise sentences.
This combined loss of veteran frontline operators and uncaptured tribal knowledge created challenges with scaling the training and support for new employees across multiple facilities.
Eliminating waste was an initial goal that unlocked other opportunities for growth. When they launched their partnership with Dozuki in 2018, the company’s root cause analysis revealed increasing cycle times. This metric suggested less experienced employees required more time to complete processes. While these people were trained well and knew how to do their job, they lacked troubleshooting experience.
What do they do when the machine fails halfway through a production run? What do they do when a roller can’t be removed during a changeover? Scenarios like this were costing the company valuable production time and millions of dollars across their 200+ plants. Traditional usage of tribal knowledge couldn’t support the scale.
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Solving this problem of waste was an initial goal that unlocked new opportunities for growth.
The company learned it wasn’t a problem that could be solved by engineers or trainers. Tactics and techniques to troubleshoot many of these unexpected issues only existed in the heads of their experienced operators.
Historically, there was no standard or process in place to allow operators to capture work instructions in process data, critical knowledge existed only in the minds of experienced operators. They needed to capture every little detail about their processes and the many scenarios that popped up during the course of each shift.
Equipping their experienced operators and technicians with tablets and an easy to use app, they began to document the tribal knowledge that had helped their company run efficiently for so long.
Dozuki is purpose built for easily authoring and capturing process knowledge and turning it into step by step instructions on the floor. This new culture around knowledge capture paved the way to their larger corporate goal of launching an enterprise level implementation of a connected worker solution across dozens of locations.
The company’s Operational Technology Engineer led the manufacturing technology team. He was tasked with productizing and rolling out the Dozuki connected worker solution.
A Lean Operations Manager explained, “Documentation was hit or miss in some work areas. Within SOP’s, operators tended to get lost about halfway through because it was so text heavy. They were not sure where the process was at, or what they were doing, and why. It was boring. Dozuki forced us to really write in a standard way. It helped our facility tremendously."
For example, one of the company’s processes had 400+ steps. Converting it to Dozuki allowed them to save in an image or video format that was easier to comprehend than just walls of raw text.
A Process Technology Specialist gave color to this improvement. She explained the company had more than 7,000 documents on their Lotus Notes install that were too easily influenced by whoever authored them, so there was a lot of variance in writing style. Standards were made, but not followed.
They also highlighted the positive feedback of the photos feature with documentation as a key lever for upskilling new workers. “For those new employees who hadn’t run the machine, they didn’t know exactly what they were looking at in work instructions. But now, having the photos as part of the writing process gets people excited. Excited to create documents? It’s not something we were used to hearing!”
As the manufacturer made gradual shifts in culture, the company also noticed there was a much larger result beyond just creating and controlling content. They were changing the way they did work. Dozuki equipped and enabled more operators to take ownership of the change process.
“Operators want to be heard,” she said. “Having been an operator myself, you’re on the frontline. You’re the one who has to respond when things go wrong, and if you don’t have the tools you need or the instructions aren’t clear, it directly impacts your day far quicker than it does anybody else in the building.”
Since piloting, productizing and rolling out this connected worker technology across the organization, there have been several key areas of significant improvement.
A partnership between Dozuki and this global manufacturing giant intertwined many departments such as support, operations, HR, IT and training. All of which received support, coaching, and a methodology for executing and scaling digital transformation. Especially the IT teams, who helped guide the multi facility rollout every step of the way.
What made it more pronounced was Dozuki facilitating gaps in their rollout through customer success. Their support was the glue in between cracks that allowed them to build momentum from a few facilities to 100+ locations.
Due to the nature of the type of industrial products the company makes, there were strict security requirements. Between the process technology and products themselves, there was substantial intellectual property that required containment.
A key benefit of Dozuki was security and data governance in a multi-facility rollout. The company needed to be able to quickly send the information to the intended audience, but still maintain proper security protocols.
Dozuki helped facilities maintain visibility of keeping on top of huge data sets of changes to updates, and approval processes. With reporting in Dozuki, frontline teams could now manage changes with better visibility.
The Dozuki Digital Transformation Services team helped factory leaders tackle administrative challenges. Their company leveraged the industry experts at rolling out connected worker solutions at scale across dozens of facilities.
