Reduce the cost of your document system!

What could we do with 3500€?

Going on a trip? Buying a car for our daughter who just got her license? Redo the bathroom?

3500€... We say we are rich when we earn more than 3500€ per month...

And yet, you spend €3500 per year and per document in your monster quality system.

The cost of the quality system.

The problem with the quality system, and its set of procedures, is that accountants, financers, managers in the broad sense do not see it.

There is no indicator in the company that indicates how many resources were consumed to feed this monster.

Often, the Quality Director complains about the lack of resources and asks the General Manager for one or two consultants, fixed-term contracts or interns. The latter often accepts these requests, but they are repeated regularly.

Finally, the CEO complains in turn, believing that QA never has enough resources despite the fact that they are given them all the time.

Behind this recurring need for resources is a reality: the documentary system is very expensive.

In fact, each document can cost up to €3500 per year, for an impact limited to a handful of people, or even more in some cases.

A corporate procedure, such as the change control procedure, which affects a group of 20,000 people, costs one million euros per year!

You then ask yourself: But what makes up this cost?

The components that make up the cost.

Let's look at the following:

• The costs of creating or modifying documents,
• Distribution costs,
• Storage costs.

Consideration should also be given to the costs of consulting documents, in particular the time spent looking for information in documents that cannot be found.

And we also include the Cost of training, whether as a simple acquaintance, or in classroom training.

The cost of editing documents is directly related to the lifespan of the documents.

When customers are asked about the latter, they often say “three years”!

But beware, this can be misleading... The maximum lifespan of a document is three years before it must pass through the revision cycle.

Of course, it is possible that the document will be validated without modification.

However, the reality is often different.

If you have 1000 documents and you make 1000 changes per year, it means that the average document lifespan is 1 year. If you have 2000 changes for 1000 documents, then this reduces the average document lifespan to 6 months.

Remember this concept of lifespan because we'll talk about it later.

Note that The document maintenance represents 40% of the total cost of the system.

Now let's move on to the cost of the consultation.

The cost of the consultation.

A study that I had access to in an R&D environment showed that people pass on average 19 minutes per day to look for information in the procedures that they could not find.

Another way to quantify this is to ask people how much time they spend each week looking for information in procedures. Often, they answer that they pass between One and two hours.

The cost of consulting the documentation represents 40 to 50% of the cost of the documentary system.

As you can see, maintenance and consultation are the two main sources of costs for your system.

When software vendors tell you that their process management system will make everything better and cost less, strongly question this argument, because technology only represents 10% of the total cost of your system.

Now that the foundations are in place, we can move on.

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How to reduce the cost of the documentary system.

Here are 3 tips to drastically reduce the cost of your procedure system.

Tip 1: Adopt a process-based approach.

The fundamental problem with the documentary system is its disorganized pyramidal side. Anyone can create a procedure or an instruction on anything, as long as the correct template is used. This leads to the presence of 4 different procedures dealing with the same thing, or even contradicting each other.

If you take a process approach and decide to do one or two procedures per process, the reduction in the number of documents will be colossal.

Combined with video work instructions, merging technical, quality, EHS, and performance content, this approach can reduce the number of documents by more than 80%.

It's a hell of a weight loss cure for our documentary system!

Tip 2: Increase the amount of information described.

Yes, I know, it's completely counterintuitive. I am talking about both reducing the cost of the system, but also about increasing its content. There is something to go crazy about!

In fact, it's simple. The problem you have is that your current documents, seen from the perspective of Michel the operator, only describe 50% of what they need to know or do (vNoir equally : 6 things you absolutely need to know about Michel (e) to be effective).

So here's what happens: while working, Michel performs 50% of actions that are not described anywhere.

Sometimes he makes mistakes.

In this case, a deviation is initiated, an investigation is conducted, and a CAPA is defined. However, CAPA is simply adding something to the document.

You put a band-aid on a wooden leg.

We go from 50% of things not described at 49.5%.

But you don't change the root problem.

This poorly structured documentation loop leads to documentary instability, and some work instructions are changed 4 times a year.

Lifespan: 3 months.

If one approaches the problem correctly, that is to say by describing Michel's activities, it is possible to achieve a description rate of more than 90/ 95%, which makes the documents very stable.

The only reasons to modify them are changes in processes or equipment.

As a result, there is a lot less maintenance to do.

Tip 3: improve accessibility to information.

As we saw earlier, the unsuccessful consultation of documents is very expensive.

It is therefore necessary to have a documentary architecture that facilitates access to information.

To do this, you need three things:

1. Process-based architecture, as already mentioned.
2. Simplified documents : SOPs showing who does what, as well as mostly video tutorials.
3. Easy access to the workstation, via a computer, tablet or other, so as not to waste time looking for information that, in half of the cases, does not exist.

The final word.

Share this article with your documentation and training team members.

Here is a link to a video that explains in detail how to use our cost calculation template for your document system. This template alone represents between 10 and 15% of your company's payroll.

You can also access part of our Doc&Training simplification training on our website.

See you on the other side!

See you soon!