I was recently going through my late grandmother’s estate looking for some of her writings that were tied to early childhood memories. The effort quickly became overwhelming. I spent hours going through 80 years of paperwork, photos and personal memorabilia inspecting and sorting items but could not find the records. But what’s worse is there was so much stuff to go through that, even days in, it appeared as though I had made no progress.
Such is the experience of many employees tasked with finding information contained in documents, models, and drawings. Study after published study by industry research giants decry the time wasted by employees searching for information contained within documents.
- Gartner says professionals spend 47% of their time searching for information, and on average, take 18 minutes to locate each document.
- IDC data shows that “the knowledge worker spends about 2.5 hours per day, or roughly 30% of the workday, searching for information.
- McKinsey Global Institute research showed that workers spend 1.8 hours every day (9.3 hours per week), searching and gathering information.
Whichever statistic you believe, the numbers boil down to losing one day of valued work per week or having to hire five people for the contributed value of four. Can you afford that level of opportunity loss?
Increasing workforce efficiency in manufacturing can be accomplished through a combination of improving employee productivity, eliminating waste, boosting operational efficiency, and/or reducing production costs. Among these options, improving employee productivity is generally considered the easiest to implement, as it often involves smaller, more readily achievable changes like optimizing workflows, providing better systems and training, and addressing workplace distractions, compared to large-scale operational overhauls like lean manufacturing or significant cost reduction strategies like digitalization.
Every manufacturing plant is a collection of thousands of documents. These models, drawings, and documents aren’t just byproducts—they are a dynamic, living and breathing asset of valuable data. Adept’s EDM system provides centralized access and control of facility as-builts, equipment drawings, capital project documentation and product data. It aligns engineering, maintenance, operations, and construction teams so everyone is on the same page, drives efficiencies and ensures document control best practices happen automatically.
"We needed a system that allowed us to best organize and integrate our information and data into database fields that captured the nomenclature and data most important in our day-to-day jobs. The goal was to have a system that would protect our documents so that no one could erase them, lose them or misapply them, while also being able to effectively search for what was needed."
Director of Engineering and Project Management, Buzzi Unicem 
Adept’s implementation has led to a 20 – 30% increase in workforce productivity, solely from the capability to collect, organize, store, access, protect, and report on data collected from operating assets. See real customer value at right. You’ll also see improvements in data integrity, safety issues and unplanned downtime, and enterprise visibility across operations. The cost of inaction is clear: higher risk, lower efficiency and shrinking profits.
"Consider how valuable your documents and data are. And consider how important true document control and management, configured to YOUR requirements, is to your organization. Data is the cornerstone of any business today and not securing it is a huge risk. If you want to do it right and do it well, the Adept platform is the gold-standard.”
Have you considered what your engineering documents are really worth to your manufacturing organization?
