Digital Work Instructions for Manufacturing

Digital manufacturing work instructions collect information from multiple sources and provide it in one simple, unified view so your operators can quickly make decisions. Traditional paper instructions aren't great. Lengthy, awkward, and hard to produce, a paper instruction manual frequently causes more problems than it solves. It is hard to keep current, hard to find, and easy to ignore. Digital work instructions for manufacturing help with this. Done well, they support better quality, less scrap and rework, and safer work.

How to create great digital WI?

Good digital work instructions and standards prevent mistakes from happening. To write digital work instructions (from the company's perspective) and understand the digital work instructions (from the end user's perspective), we must give them a clear and logical structure. To achieve this they should be:

• User-centric and task-oriented
• Effective and easy to understand
• Effortless to author and publish
• Available and instantly discoverable

To create a great digital WI you should specify the goal of the work instructions. Your steps should then be designed to guide the viewer to reach the goal. Add very clear visuals at every step. Where the movement matters, use video, as it shows the action rather than describing it. Add a short action-oriented text to each step. It's important to remember that your end-user will be a human performing work in a potentially dangerous environment. Sometimes, additional information must be added to ensure a safe and effective work environment.

The benefits of using digital work instructions for manufacturing

Good digital work instructions are crucial for any manufacturing company since they explain the best way to complete a specific procedure in a standardized way. They translate procedure into a human-centered way of working that allows any employee on the shop floor to complete the task at hand safely and efficiently. By providing your team with clear and to-the-point digital work instructions, you can expect:

• continuously improved processes,
• increased operational efficiency and safety,
• reduced machine changeover time and downtime,
• more effective training procedures,
• capture and share tribal knowledge,
• a more motivated workforce.

Version control, approval and sign-off

A digital instruction is only useful if everyone is working from the right version. This is where most "digital" systems that are really shared folders fall short. Four things matter:

• Version control. Every change creates a new version, and the old one is kept. You can see what changed, when and why, and go back if needed.
• Approval. A change is reviewed and approved before it reaches the shop floor. The author is not the only person who checks it, and nothing half-finished goes live.
• One live version. Once a revision is approved, the previous version is withdrawn everywhere at once. There are no old printouts or local copies left at the station.
• Sign-off and a record. Operators confirm they have read the new version. You end up with a record of who saw which version of which instruction, and when.

That record is what quality teams and auditors ask for. When a defect turns up, it answers the question "was this operator working from the current instruction?" without anyone digging through training binders.

Which digital WI software to choose?

If you are convinced that you should move away from paper-based work instruction, then there's a couple of options on how you can implement a digital work instruction system in your organization. The first option is to simply convert all your paper-based instruction into PDFs. But that's not something that we would recommend. You still haven't solved the major problems that come with paper-based instruction – you only made your employees read the same thing on a screen. PDFs on a shared drive also give you no approval flow and no record of who read what.

If you really want to create great digital instructions, you need to think out of the box. In our work with manufacturers, we have found that video is an underused medium in the world of work instructions. Unlike text and images, a video shows you exactly what you should be doing, which leaves much less room for misinterpretation.

To create video work instructions you could use a video editor like Adobe's Premiere, but that might be a bit too much for your technical writer. You would need to train them in media management and video editing. A dedicated work instruction tool keeps the editing simple and handles versions, approval and distribution for you.

Where REWO fits

REWO Guides turns video, images and text into step-by-step instructions, with two-step approval and full version history. Operators confirm what they have read, and REWO Analytics keeps the record of who viewed and confirmed which version, with an audit trail and CSV export. If you want to see it with your own instructions, book a demo.

Read next: REWO Analytics · IATF 16949 work instructions at the workstation · The complete guide to work instructions