Instant Instructions

As experienced maintenance and installation workers age and retire, their extensive knowledge retires with them. Transferring that knowledge is the key to long-term business success, but creating accurate, effective instructions can be challenging and costly. TNO has the technology to make expert knowledge more accessible and easily transferable to new employees. This ensures new workers get the guidance they need, and can work independently more swiftly.

Instant Instructions

An industry-wide challenge

Digitising critical industrial maintenance and installation instructions is key to ensuring that processes and protocols are followed, quality is controlled, and knowledge transfer is successful. But current digital work instruction software is complex and often requires a systems or manufacturing engineer to manage it. Those engineers often perform multiple functions on site and don’t have the time to create thorough instructions. They are also not the workers who perform maintenance and installations every day, and thus the system for transferring essential – and often specialised – instructions is sub-optimal from the start.

TNO has developed a platform that is so easy to use, it can be operated by any employees on the work floor. So, those with the practical knowledge can actually train future employees on the best ways to perform tasks. With Instant Instructions, workers need only a tablet and the Instant Instructions web application to collect a complete set of useful, specific, and easy-to-follow instructions for every task.

A one-click solution

With Instant Instructions, workers use a tablet to film each other performing routine and specialised maintenance and installation tasks, and explain each step of what they are doing. The power of AI then translates that input into easy-to-follow, step-by-step written instructions and accompanying video of each step. Once uploaded into the platform, the instructions can be controlled for quality, improved where needed, and translated into any language that might be required. Workers need only to know how to take a video with the tablet and explain the processes in their own words, and AI does the rest.

Once the instructions have been transformed into instructions, future workers can simply sign into a secure, company-specific environment within the app to search, retrieve, and use the instructions for each specific task. Instant Instructions is so easy to use, it can be applicable to a variety of industries, from hardware maintenance to production companies to healthcare organisations. In addition, Instant Instructions can operate on its own, or be integrated into existing digital work instruction platforms to simplify and streamline those systems.

Needs-driven solutions

TNO developed Instant Instructions in direct response to an industry need for a faster, simpler, more affordable, and more accurate way to capture, transfer, and preserve maintenance and other industrial instructions. As a Phase 1 Tech Transfer project, Instant Instructions is already at an advanced stage of maturity. The Instant Instructions team is ready to perform a pilot project to prove the concept and address any unforeseen challenges of its use in practice. Once validated, the Instant Instructions team will explore a wide variety of applications and use cases for the technology.

Want to learn more about Instant Instructions or participate in a pilot testing of the technology?