Lack of product tracking ability led to loss of productivity

The Issue: 

One company I worked at maintained many procedural documents that were driven by regulatory compliance laws. We developed a number of different products based around these regulations; manuals, online training, in-person training, etc. For each specific topic we might have a half-dozen specific versions of products that support it. And then there were broader categorically related topics. For example; if a new regulation came out about Electricity in the workplace there may be 7 or 8 different topics that have to deal with that, and each of them would have 6 different versions.

When I started working there every time new regulations were updated the employees would go into the files and start scanning them one by one, looking for any files that related to the topic so that they could be checked. With the large number of files and topics that we had, this process took a while – roughly 80 man hours to thoroughly check all of the files. We also had no good way of knowing if a file was actually updated or not.

The Solution: 

I developed a Document ID system that we coded into the footer of the documents. This system allowed us to very quickly – find all of the documents related to a specific category, find all of the documents related to a specific topic, find all of the documents that were of a specific type, find all of the documents that were written in a specific language or for a specific customer, and find out exactly when the document was updated last.

The Results: 

What used to take an average of 80 man hours every quarter to go through and update could be accomplished in as few as 4 hours once the system was put into place. This saved the company $10,000 in productivity costs each year and allowed us to more quickly update our training content.