Your plant shouldn't stop when one person is away.
In most manufacturing SMEs, some of the most important know-how exists only in a few people's heads. We document it and make it available to your whole team, before someone walks out with it.
- 15 years in manufacturing and supply chain systems
- Based in Quebec, service in French
- Delivered Law 25 compliant
- Eligible for Quebec grants
YOUR SITUATION
Does this sound like you?
One person holds the answers. When the line makes that noise, everyone calls the same person. When they are on vacation, you wait or you improvise.
A departure is coming and nobody is ready. Retirement in 12 or 18 months. You know the know-how has to be handed over, but nobody has time to take care of it. The replacement only learns what they think to ask.
Training a new hire takes months. They ask the same questions, interrupt the same people, repeat the classic mistakes. Training is mostly shadowing, so it depends on your best employees having time.
The procedures exist, but nobody reads them. A binder last updated in 2019, a shared folder nobody can find, documents written for an audit rather than for the floor.
Everything rests on you. You are the only one who can estimate a non-standard job, who knows each customer's history, who knows which supplier to call when things stall.
THE COST
What it costs
Undocumented know-how costs you twice. Now, in wasted time you've come to accept as normal. And later, all at once, the day it walks out the door:
Months of lost productivity while the replacement learns alone what the departing employee already knew.
Costly mistakes: rough settings, scrap, late deliveries, customer complaints.
Your best people tied up in training and troubleshooting instead of production.
A less transferable business. A buyer or a successor pays for operations that run without the owner, not for the owner's memory.
And time is against you: every month you wait is one month less to capture that know-how with the person, instead of rebuilding it after they've gone.
WHAT WE DELIVER
What we deliver
The map of your critical know-how. Who knows what, and what actually happens if that person isn't there tomorrow. That's the starting point: we don't document everything, we document what hurts.
Know-how captured at the source. Structured interviews, observation at the workstation, real cases recorded. We go after what people actually do, not what the official procedure says they should do.
Work instructions usable on the floor. One per workstation, with photos and real cases, written to be read during the shift, not to sit in a binder.
A troubleshooting base. Symptom → likely causes → what to do, built from the real history of your equipment and the experience of your people.
An assistant your teams can query. Your employees ask their question in plain French and get the answer from your own documents. That's what gets documentation used instead of left on a shelf.
Training for your teams. So people look it up instead of calling the same person.
HOW WE SOLVE PROBLEMS
Understand, improve, equip, augment.
We start from the problem and pick the simplest fix that will last. This page covers one of the four steps.
- 1You are here
Understand
Find the know-how at risk, organize how it gets collected, standardize the documentation. Most of the work happens here, and none of it needs technology.
- 2
Improve
When the problem is the way work gets done: unclear roles, duplicated steps, information that doesn't reach the right person. We fix the process with what you already have. It's fast, cheap, and you don't depend on any vendor.
Operations Efficiency - 3
Equip
Put the documentation where people work: at the workstation, on a tablet, inside the tools you already use.
Systems and Software - 4
Augment
Transcribing and organizing hours of interviews, or letting an employee ask your procedures a question instead of digging through files. Here AI makes know-how easier to reach. It never replaces it.
AI Mastery
Automating a bad process only speeds up the mess. That's why we rarely start with technology, and never with AI.
WHERE TO START
Thirty minutes to find out whether this applies to you.
Two ways to start, both free: talk it through with us, or size it up yourself first.
The discovery call
Thirty minutes. You tell us what's not working, we tell you how we can help and where to start.
The free self-assessment
Ten questions to measure how much you depend on a few people. In fifteen minutes you get a score and where to act, without talking to us.