Friday, 4:23PM. It's the end of a busy week. The team is ready for the weekend, people are ready to shut off their computers and go home. Peter, a sales associate, sees his inbox pop up with a request for an urgent quote. It is a complex order. It will demand custom manufacturing. It also asks for a specific turn-around time.
Peter knows there are specific policies on custom orders. But he can’t remember exactly in which document he can find it. Is it part of the regular field manual? He logs in to the company’s SharePoint and starts browsing through. It’s 4:38 PM. He still has no clue where it is: could it be the sales organization SOP? Or is it a standalone policy covering this?
4:55 PM. He hears his colleagues getting up and packing their things. His phone starts buzzing with messages asking if he’s going to join a few of them for happy hour. By now, he can almost taste the first sip of beer... and he’s nowhere closer to finding the specific policy. “This can wait until Monday”, he decides, and starts getting ready to leave. As it turns out, it couldn’t. The company loses out on a major deal, and Peter, on his commission and bonus.
If only there had been a quick way for him to find that information at once...
The Need for Standardization
The early stages of a business are an exploratory journey. Procedures are not yet set in stone. You and the team are still figuring out processes. And that means you can be flexible in how you meet customer demands. You can improvise as you figure things out.
But as you grow, this becomes unsustainable. This approach gives businesses flexibility and speed, but it has a cost: uncertainty. The lack of documentation and established procedures makes it (almost) impossible to ensure quality and standardization, especially when onboarding new employees, outsourcing and delegating tasks, and growing beyond the first stages.
Without proper documentation, new hires and contractors can only count on training, communication, and messages exchanged as their only guidance. This creates potential points of failure.
To continue to deliver as your customers expect (or to exceed their expectations), you need to standardize. That means preparing documents such as policies, SOPs, guidelines, field manuals. You need documents that let your employees and contractors know:
What to do
How to do it
Expected results
Any other details necessary to ensure quality.
Such documentation makes it easier to onboard new staff and to inform third parties what the expectations are. They will not depend only on training to learn. They’ll have a documented source of truth that can guide them. The information will be centralized and can be made accessible 24/7. This reduces the possibility of human error and removes a bottleneck. But there is a trade-off...
While the business is still small and relatively simple, it is easy enough to refer to policies. There will only be a small number of documents, which will tend to be short. As the organization grows, however, policies and procedures will increase in number, length, and complexity.
That’s when you can find yourself in a situation like Peter’s. Documentation becomes too complex, disorganized, and inefficient. It becomes harder to manage it, and even harder to enforce compliance.
Peter’s is not an isolated case. And it is not the worst possible scenario. Yes, missing a potential sale due to complex documentation is bad. But imagine:
Ignoring edge cases because they’re in a separate document?
Struggling to find the right procedure during an emergency?
Misinterpreting crucial safety information due to lack of clarity?
On the one hand, robust, detailed policies ensure compliance and high-quality standards. But they also slow down businesses. They create roadblocks, reduce flexibility, and lead to loss of time and productivity.
The more complex an SOP or policy, the harder it will be to enforce it and ensure adherence. The more documents you have, the more cases you can cover... but the more fragmented your information is. This all creates new possibilities for human error.
And then you find yourself in a corner... Your processes are too complex, your organization is too large, so they demand accurate and complete documentation. But this means it is also complex and large... even if you simplify as much as possible. You’re back to square one.
Here’s the million-dollar question... How can you ensure that the information is complete and correct, but still is easy to find, access and understand, even for the most complex procedures?
Two letters: AI.
AI as a Knowledge Management Tool
Peter has a limited memory. He might not remember what all the policies are nor all the places he can find them. He’ll face frustration looking for them. And he can only scan through them and read them so fast.
- Its memory is comparatively limitless. Also, human brains depend on repetition for memories not to degrade. AI “brains” are not subject to such degradation. Give it the information once, and it’ll forever know where to find it.
- While the average adult can read between 200 and 300 words per minute, some generative AIs can process roughly 75,000 words – the average length of a novel – in the same amount of time. And it doesn’t just “read”. Using natural language processing, AI can parse, understand, and analyze text. It can then extract relevant information or perform specific tasks based on the content.
- AI excels at pattern matching, finding connections at blazing speed even in large datasets. It can find the information needed much faster than a human ever could, provided it has access to it.
- AI is not subject to cognitive or emotional biases that could affect its decision-making skills or its judgment.
- Humans like Peter (or you or I and anyone else) have limited cognitive bandwidth. Meaning, we can only focus on one thing at once. AI tools can perform several tasks simultaneously or in parallel.
So, what would it look like if Peter had access to an AI tool?
Introducing ForagerIQ
Introducing ForagerIQ
ForagerIQ is Hammrtech’s AI tool, created to provide you fast access to your own information, combined with analysis and accurate insights. With it, you can create and manage knowledge bases with your own documentation and use a chat interface to get information and insights based on them.
It is a simple three-step process:
Create and name your knowledge base.
Upload your PDF files with documents relevant to your organization or department. ForagerIQ will ingest and prepare them to be queried at any time. You’ll receive an email when they’re done and ready to be searched.
Access the chat interface and ask ForagerIQ any questions you might have about your documents.
ForagerIQ will not only answer your questions. It will also cite your documents as sources and link you to where you can find them. No more combing through shared folders and wasting time trying to read piles of policies to get the information you need.
You control what documents the AI has access to. You can add or remove documents from the knowledge base at any time. You choose which knowledge bases your staff will have access to.
Behind the scenes, ForagerIQ does all the heavy lifting to manage your information. After the ingestion process, it will have your documents indexed and ready to be searched. No need to worry about complex folder structures. And the best part?
ForagerIQ can retrieve the correct information fast. Within seconds, it will have the answer to any question, backed up by your own source documents.
How would Peter’s scenario go if he had ForagerIQ available?
- Instead of logging in to SharePoint, Peter goes to ForagerIQ’s chat interface.
- Instead of digging through folders and files, he would have chosen his sales department knowledge base. The knowledge base has the exact documents he needs to perform his task. He doesn’t need to look through tons of documents or navigate through folders.
- Instead of scanning through different files looking for the information, he simply asks about custom orders and times.
- In minutes, Peter has the exact policy and section he needs to draft the quote. He prepares it and sends it to the client before 4:55 PM. Off he goes to happy hour with his colleagues, excited to hear back from the new lead.
No missed opportunities. No frustration. No time wasted looking for a needle in a haystack. Peter can now focus his time and effort on his true job: selling.
Check out the Power of ForagerIQ
Check out the Power of ForagerIQ
Are you tired of struggling with maintaining complex documentation? Do you want to ensure your employees can always find the policies and procedures they need? And find them fast? Above all: Do you want your staff to spend more of their time doing their real, lever-moving duties?
ForagerIQ can help you. Let it oversee indexing documents and finding information, so that you and your staff can focus on what really matters for your business.
Contact us and schedule a ForagerIQ demo today to see what it can do for you and your business.
