KPSCAN

Every machine in a factory has paperwork behind it – a manual, a cleaning card, procedures, certificates. It all exists. It just sits in folders the person standing at the machine can't open. So I put a code on the machine that opens that machine's paperwork instead. It's early days: the register is built and the first labels are on the floor.

The problem

When a machine goes down at three in the morning, whoever is fixing it needs that machine's paperwork now. In practice that means walking to an office, knowing which folder to open, and knowing what the machine is called in the system. Those three are rarely true at once, so the paperwork gets skipped. And whatever the fitter worked out that night stays with the fitter.

The solution

Scan the code on a machine and you get one page for that machine, and nothing else. That much is built and running.

• Its cleaning card opens straight from the page, without a SharePoint login. The procedure sits beside it – the slot is built, nothing published into it yet.
• A folder for each department – maintenance, hygiene, production, health and safety, certificates – so people find their own paperwork without wading through everyone else's.
• The page is an index, not a copy. Every link opens the real document where it already lives, so there's one master and the permissions stay the company's.
• The label doesn't go stale. The code points at the machine, not at a file, so documents can be moved or renamed and nothing on the floor gets reprinted.

What changed

247 machines are in the register, each with its own code and its own page, and 2,073 document links were checked against the live system before go-live. The labels go on area by area, starting with prep – eight machines are wearing one so far.

The part that isn't built yet

I've watched a maintenance team spend about six hours on a job they'd never done before, then do the same job in an hour the next time. The difference is knowing how, and right now that knowing stays with whoever did it first.

So the next step is a folder on each machine's page that only the maintenance team can write to. Finish a job, record two minutes on your phone about the part that caught you out, and it sits against that machine for whoever scans the code next. Everyone else still only reads.

That's the plan, not the present.