General Meeting Recap: Intranet Documentation - A Case Study

by Marisa Latin, Hospitality Manager

This is the story of how Blount, using only its current resources, successfully moved an ISO documentation system online in a manufacturing community.

The Situation

Blount Canada Ltd., in Guelph, Ontario, is an international manufacturer of saw chains, guide bars, and sprockets. While its head office is in Portland, Oregon, the Guelph office alone employs over 900 people.

In 1995, Blount received ISO-9002 registration and, since then, it has spent a lot of time maintaining and updating its ISO documentation. Employees refer to ISO procedures for every machine floor task on a regular basis. For safety and quality reasons, the documentation must be current at all locations at all times, which is why the documentation is updated frequently.

The Mission

Ben McCarl, Manager of Quality and IT at Blount Canada Ltd., was given the mandate to make the volumes of ISO documentation easier to manage, update, and distribute. He began the company's intranet project a few years ago.

The Challenges

Ben had to develop a solution that would address the following challenges:

• Many employees on the manufacturing shop floors were not comfortable using computers, and some had never used one.
• Employees were used to paper documentation. Once ISO documentation went online, employees would not be permitted to print it. This step was required to ensure that only the latest documentation was circulated and used. If printing was allowed shredding procedures would have been necessary, which was too costly and time-consuming.
• There were 900 employees but only 170 computers. Getting more computers was not a cost-effective option.
• English was not the primary language of many machine floor employees.
• There were no Web or design professionals on board at the start of this process.

The Process

The plan was to start small and not aim at being perfect, but at being good enough. The goal was to get information online as soon as possible. To encourage employees to go to the new Web site, it had to be fun. In the beginning, 90% of the material on the Web site was not directly job related. 

Generating Interest

Employees went to the site to read what was on the lunch cafeteria menu, what the weather was going to be like, or who was giving away free stuff in the 'Employee Marketplace'. 

Links like 'What's New' and anonymous 'Feedback' were also well received. 

One of the most popular pages became the nurse's 'Health and Safety' site. It was frequently updated with new articles about different ailments that employees could relate to because of friends and family, or that they just found interesting.

The 'Number of Hits' counter was also a point of interest, and some employees went to the site over and over again just to make the hit counter go up. Although the counter itself ended up having no value, the goal to get employees to use the intranet was met.

Finding Willing Participants

To make the site easier to navigate for employees with a limited amount of computers and no printing capabilities, Ben sought the assistance of willing participants in each department to take ownership of their own sections of the Web site and manage the content in a way that would be ideal for their department. They became the council.

Deciding on a Look and Format

It was decided that the department pages would remain diverse, since they were asking non-graphic people to go online. MS FrontPage was chosen as the software to create the pages because all of the participants already had it on their systems. The ‘designers’ were given the guideline to limit their look to 3 colors or to use a template. 

Some of the documentation was best delivered in .html format while other worked best in .pdf format, which was similar to how paper copies look. The result was that every department had its own personality. Since most employees would mainly access information in their own department, they could easily tell when they were in the wrong location.

To make mountains of procedures easy to find online, a paper on the shop floor listed the operation numbers that employees needed to complete their tasks. The number of each operation was made clearly visible on or within a layer of the department’s home page. (For ergonomic reasons, employees don't do the same job all the time.)

Introducing Graphics

To make the site easy to navigate for non-English speaking employees, the team added pictures and diagrams at every opportunity. Blount later hired a co-op Web programming student who helped design icons and other items.

The Results

Ben knew that employees were using the intranet when they started saying things like 'Shouldn't this (memo, data, document) go online?' and 'I can't find this online.'

Many other unforeseen benefits came about. The process of changing one's address or license plate number with Human Resources was greatly improved once it moved online. Employees were now able to track their vacation hours and the training courses they still needed to complete internally.

The Web site is constantly evolving. When an employee can't find something, even when it's there, the Web contributors seek and implement a solution. Blount will continue to add content and, to automate processes, simplifying what they can.

Just how successful is this intranet? Productivity goes up every year. Efficiency go up every year. It's hard to tell why. What Ben does know is that the Web site serves the need of its users. It works.

About Marisa Latin

Marisa has been a technical writer for over ten years and is currently at Inscriber. She lives with her lively family and long list of pets. In her spare time, you can find her seeking nature's wonders and capturing 'life' on camera.