Visual Workflows Improve Knowledge Sharing

Easily accessible visual Workflows improve knowledge sharing, offering help any time for engineers and scalable help for customers anywhere. They are a fundamental part of the transformation we’re attempting.

I don’t expect our recent post on visual workflows (here in case you missed it - or find the Canva link below) will get nearly as many impressions as the pictures of engineers wearing RealWear Navigator-500 headsets (which is why I’m using one of those as my title image!). But the Workflows oculavis Share is allowing us to build and share between engineers are an incredible long-term opportunity.

Geographical Constraints

When I joined SSS, over 9 years ago, I spent the first 6 months almost physically connected to my trainer and mentor, David Williams. I spent my time, writing notes, shadowing his work and asking hundreds of questions. I did the same with our OEM and channel partner engineers too. Slowly, I built the confidence and competence to go out on my own. After the cord was cut, right through to today, I still seek their advice and experience often.

Consulting with one’s mentor, and later peers, has been the nature of training, apprenticeship and work for thousands of years. When we added the ability to phone each other for advice, we geographically extended the reach of that real-time support. When we added email, we then deepened the context and bandwidth of that support. Finally, we’ve added video and AR support to the mix, improving the sense of presence and the speed of the impact it has.

Combined, these technologies effectively remove geography as a constraint on real-time peer-to-peer support networks. Today, our engineers can quickly and easily transfer deeply complex knowledge across huge distances, near instantly. But for each of these technologies, peers are required to be temporally in synch: asking for help, and providing assistance must be simultaneous actions.

Note: Yes, email leaves an option on this, allowing users to send a message to a peer who is unavailable, but an email conversation still does not advance until that peer returns.

Temporal Constraints

In practical terms this means when a service engineer needs help, they also need the right expert to be available to provide that help. We frequently find that this isn’t possible; colleagues are on-site elsewhere, on holiday or sick; our manufacturing partners are busy with their own work, helping other customers etc. As a result, a quick, but vital question, goes unanswered. And that can have a real-world impact for us and for our customers.

It’s also perhaps obvious, but the more questions engineers need support with, the more this effect comes into play. As a result, it’s more acute for young / trainee engineers, or engineers doing something new. This constrains businesses from growing quickly or efficiently.

Seven years ago, we started documenting technical support issues in a new way: when we closed an issue, we made the effort to book-end the investigation with a list of the issue’s symptoms and a description of the solution. Since these issues are all databased, and therefore searchable, we’ve been able to ‘Google’ this system for answers to new problems when they emerge.

This was the start of an effort to remove that temporal synchronisation requirement. Whilst this has been really helpful on occasion, descriptions are brief and can be confusing. We often end up reaching out to the engineer who dealt with the issue for more details.

Always-On Knowledge

Today, we’re building workflows for many of these solutions and connecting them to both the specific instrument, the class of related instruments and the technical issue itself. When we search a symptom we’re seeing, we’re aiming for an engineer to receive a fully illustrated, step-by-step solution to the problem.

This means that any engineer can query the experience of another engineer, at any time because Workflows are 'Always-on', improving knowledge sharing and knowledge access. There’s no need for both engineers to be online simultaneously. My knowledge is now David’s knowledge and vice versa. I can handle issues for him whilst he’s busy, freeing him up for the work only he can do. He can handle issues only I have direct experience with.

Training new engineers is now less burdensome; scaling the business is more affordable; We’re a more resilient organisation. We are, all round, better able to serve our customers.

– Nathan Burley, Senior Field Service Engineer