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July 28, 2025
150 documents to read!
This is what Michel, your newcomer, goes through when he joins your company.
It's purgatory!
Afterwards, we are surprised that he makes mistakes and does not respect procedures.
And again, when you know that these 150 procedures only correctly cover 50% of what Michel does during a day, you can only see that the documentary system is a real Gruyère cheese: full of holes, greasy and indigestible.
Who is ultimately guilty?
You?
Probably not.
In fact, there are fundamental reasons why your document system is underperforming.
About ten years ago, I went to diagnose a pharmaceutical site in England.
There were 30% outdated documents in the document system.
It's huge!
The problem was that they had way too many documents to maintain and that the team in charge was no longer efficient or productive enough to keep the system afloat.
This problem could happen tomorrow in any lab, but also in any bank or any company in the energy sector.
The boxes are dying under the paperwork.
In another case (much more recent), a documentary efficiency of less than 10% was calculated.
This means that Michel the operator has less than a 10% chance of finding the information he needs in the procedure system, when he needs it.
Here, this 10% case is a bit extreme.
In general, documentary efficiencies of the order of 25% are found.
This is still low when you know that a document costs between 3000 and 5000€ per year depending on the case for small documents and can cost several hundreds of thousands of euros per year for corporate documents.
Businesses are literally throwing money directly into the paper shredder, swallowed up by the documentary monster.
Traditionally, in boxes, the performance of the documentary system is measured with 2 indicators: the number of outdated documents, the number of new documents created.
Broadly speaking, we can measure that the transit of the documentary process is working well.
And again...
Often, we do not measure transition times, “not good at first time”, the age of those in progress...
In all cases, we do not measure whether the documents managed are effective for the person who needs them: Michel.
Michel can be you, me, a product operator, a person in quality control, accounting, IT, behind a customer counter...
In short, Michel is the worker, the person who carries out tasks.
We are all Michel at some point in our day.
And the purpose of the documentary system is to provide Michel, when he is performing his task, with the most relevant instruction possible, at the time when he needs it, and that this instruction is accurate.
In the past, an indicator was invented to measure documentary effectiveness: it is the T.E.D. documentary effectiveness rate.
This indicator is composed of 3 factors:
First factor: the coverage rate.
We measure whether everything Michel has to do during his activities is described correctly.
The average measurement we take here is of the order of 50-60%.
This means that half of what Michel has to do is not described anywhere, or very partially described.
Second factor: the accessibility rate.
We measure whether Michel can easily access the information he is looking for. Does he know how to access the documentary system?
Don't laugh...
We saw production procedures that were supposed to be on line and were on the other side of the wall, in a closet.
Then does Michel know in which document to find the information he is looking for?
There is often panic
Does Michel understand what is written?
Because when procedures are written by engineers in an office, they are not always written in a language that Michel can understand.
Accessibilities of less than 40% are commonly measured.
Finally, the third factor of T.E.D: the validity of the information.
Because if Michel can easily access the information described, as long as it is accurate.
Here, we measure the outdated rate but also the error rate in the documents.
We arrive at a validity rate that easily exceeds 90%.
And thankfully!
Given all the people who take care of maintaining them...
In the end, T.E.D is the combination of these 3 factors.
For example:
50% coverage,
Accessibility 40%,
Validity 90%.
That's 18% Documentary Effectiveness.
In other words, when Michel is in doubt, he only has 18% of having the information he is looking for in the documentary system, just when he needs it (hoping that the information is accurate).
So, to be on the safe side, Michel asks René for help, who finally knows no more than he does.
We are in an oral culture that generates excesses of practice.
However, you spend a lot of money maintaining your document system.
The fundamental problem here is that the documentary system is not efficient from Michel's point of view.
We can't say that 18% of T.E.D is good.
You would have to reach 70 or 80% to be good.
To do this, the documentary system must be completely oriented on Michel.
I am immediately showing you 3 actions to take right now to have a documentary system centered on Michel, the end user, that is effective, and that costs much less than your current system.
You can also find the content of this article on our YouTube channel, and subscribe 👍
It is the most structuring action.
It acts directly on the coverage rate.
Today, your documentary system is a real sieve from Michel's point of view.
The authors of procedures write SOP on SOP because every time they have an idea or a requirement, they put it in a document and push it to Michel.
This “rainy” approach leaves gaping holes that have not been described.
The best way to cover 100% of what Michel does is to start with business processes.
We describe the processes, then the sub-processes, then the activities, and only after that, we put on each activity all the quality, health, safety, environment, or performance requirements that allow Michel to do the right thing.
From then on, 100% of what he must perform is described.
The direct impact of this approach is to reduce your documentary volume by 50 to 80% depending on the case.
Yes yes, we are talking about deleting 50 to 80% of your existing SOPs.
In addition, the coverage rate easily climbs to 90% (or even more).
Let's say 90% to be reasonable and not a perfectionist.
The magic of T.E.D is that in front of each factor of the indicator, there are solutions.
To improve accessibility to information, all you have to do is ask yourself the question.
Concretely, Michel must first be able to access the documents from his workstation.
Put a PC or tablet near his workstation, or even on the workstation directly.
Remove anything that is useless, give him shortcuts to the documents he needs.
Even better, if you have a Manufacturing Execution System, an MES, to guide the execution and ensure the recording of data in real time, make direct links between the MES and the documents on the MES pages.
But that is not all.
We have already reduced the number of documents by 50 to 80%.
Then create navigation links between the documents, as on the internet in Wikipedia.
Then, title your documents so that they are explicit.
Finally, for everything that is complicated, do video tutorials as I explain here: 3.5 types of videos to simplify documentation and training.
It's easier and more effective.
So yes, I know, some of you will say that all you have to do is put on augmented reality, with glasses and Michel will be guided automatically.
I'll tell you why not, but sparingly then.
Because it's very expensive, it's not easy to maintain, and for old products, old installations, or low-margin products, we don't necessarily have the resources for that.
On the other hand, a good Marmitton tutorial will do the trick.
I know you already do it, but I've seen sites with 30% of outdated documents.
I also saw documents that were not out of date, but full of errors.
So if you're diagnosing a low validity rate, fix that.
Michel will look at the documents once, twice and if he sees errors, he will consider that all the documents are full of errors.
Encourage Michel to report errors he discovers in the documents.
It's a good way to get them involved.
Thanks to actions 2 and 3, accessibility can exceed 90%.
Come on, I'll do it to you 80%.
Push the validity up to 95% in parallel.
So, if you apply the recos of this article, you will have: coverage 90%, accessibility 80%, validity 95%.
That gives us a 70% TED.
Which is very good considering that you come from 20%.
If you enjoyed it, share this article with your documentation and training teams.
Have them calculate a TED and check that when they do procedures, they are oriented on Michel.
On our website, you can also access some of our DOC&training simplification training...
So see you on the other side!
See you soon!