4 Good Reasons for Digital Work Instructions

Document versions à la work instruction.final_final_final pile up on the PC and it sometimes takes days until the update is distributed across all areas or company locations. Errors occur, even though the work instruction seems to be clear. Does this sound familiar? Then you probably still create and distribute your work instructions via e-mail or paper printouts.

If your employees in assembly, maintenance or service need to work efficiently and without errors, they need one thing in particular: helpful and up-to-date work instructions. But working with conventional work instructions often proves difficult, especially when a lot of information has to be taken into account. Employees who have to gather the necessary data and drawings by hand and can never be sure whether they have the current status take longer to prepare their work and may also deliver poorer results. If this is a permanent situation, it quickly affects the company's performance and, not least, the quality of its products and services. You can counteract this by effectively supporting your employees with digital work instructions.

Digital makes the difference

With work instructions, you describe a specific work process and specify to the employee what is to be done, with what, and how. Often, work instructions are even already available in digitalized form, for example, if you organize your specifications in table form via Excel or based on parts lists from your ERP. The crucial difference between a traditional and a modern, digital work instruction lies in the improved possibilities it offers in terms of creating, providing, maintaining and following work specifications.

You decrease your versioning and distribution efforts

There are many good reasons to use digital work instructions. One of the most important is the ease with which you can version and distribute your documents. In the new, modern form, you maintain and distribute all data and information paperlessly from a central location. You only need to press a button and your update is immediately available for the work process.

Your employees can count on always working with the latest work instructions and the correctly assigned documents. Time-consuming synchronization, redistribution and printing of versions belongs to the past with a digital work instruction.

Digital work instructions make it easier for your employees

Errors often occur due to a lack of overview and dwindling concentration. If you have to work your way through long documents or scroll through tables, you can easily overlook or forget something.

With digital work instructions, you can reduce extensive or complex work specifications to the presentation of the next process step in each case.

Through better structuring, you relieve your employees and enable them to complete their work quickly and without errors.

You provide guidance that is appropriate for the qualification

The way something is explained has a significant impact on your employee's performance. In comparison to their experienced colleagues, inexperienced workers need more detailed instructions and information, for example when they have to position an assembly part correctly.

Whereas with conventional work instructions your workers have to prepare all the information themselves, with digital work instructions they are shown the appropriate level of detail without any further intervention.

Digital work instructions are used, among other things, in the assembly of control cabinets. With versions consisting of thousands of components and assemblies, it is a real challenge for every worker. Among other things, the worker must:

ensure the positioning of the correct component
observe electrical and mechanical values
and select the correct torque.

The work plan provides the worker with all the information that is required for the execution of the job. Nevertheless, employees have to compile this information themselves from drawings, parts lists and paper folders. In the process, mixed-up or forgotten components and incorrectly assigned torques are not uncommon. The digital work instruction now enables him to work error-free:

It guides the worker step-by-step through the assembly process.
All information is already automatically preselected and correctly assigned so that the worker can focus on his actual work.
This not only ensures the desired product quality, but also significantly reduces work preparation time.