Knox Company develops innovative rapid access solutions for first responders and fire and life safety executives with products that provide fast, safe, and secure entry into commercial, industrial, educational, and residential properties, while minimizing damage and maximizing safety. Today, more than 15,000 fire, EMS, and law enforcement agencies, as well as schools, universities, and corporations, rely on Knox products to gain access to over one million buildings and to protect their most critical assets.

Knox’s documentation process had become expensive, frustrating, and unsustainable. Teammates spent 80% of their week inside Microsoft Word, battling formatting issues and pushing edits through a slow, PDF-based review cycle that often took two to ten business days, even for something as simple as a typo.

Every minor change triggered a full company-wide change order meeting, burning valuable time and resources. The process created risk. Knox employees wanted to do the right thing, but the tools and processes they were using simply wouldn’t allow it. Simple changes and operator suggested improvements weren’t implemented because of the size of the effort.

After partnering with Dozuki, the Knox team designed an intentional, collaborative rollout process that began with internal lines under full company control.

They assembled a tiger team team and deliberately included some cross-functional team members to ensure early buy-in. Their goal was to create a system that worked well enough to speak for itself and to earn cross-functional trust from skeptics by inviting them to help with the roll-out team.

By consistently keeping up with operator comments and responding quickly, the engineering team demonstrated that they were engaged and that frontline feedback mattered. This simple but deliberate practice transformed the relationship between operators and engineers, creating a safer, more empowering environment that strengthened the entire operation.

The team also created a “Knox Dozuki Best Practices” document to standardize usage, integrated Dozuki courses into onboarding and training workflows, and made key distinctions between major and minor changes. This allowed non-critical edits to bypass the full change order cycle and receive faster peer review. Updates that once took weeks were now implemented in days or hours.

Operator engagement surged. Comments became a vital new channel for surfacing improvements that had previously gone unspoken. Feedback from the floor directly improved how products were built, and because changes could be implemented quickly, trust and ownership grew across the operation.

The role of Dozuki at Knox expanded beyond process digitization. Teams began using it for training new hires, building skills matrices, managing RMA team onboarding, and creating multilingual translations for their global manufacturing partners. Admins started building a tooling database complete with part numbers, images, and full revision traceability, making it easier to connect tools to instructions and quickly identify downstream impacts when updates were made.

One of the clearest signs of success came from an unexpected place. A contract manufacturer has also embraced and advocated for it. That partner is now planning to roll out Dozuki across their entire operation as well.