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The Challenge
Recently, Merck L&D teams had a few issues to solve: reduce paper waste, choose the correct tools for training and development, and reduce errors from labor-intensive manual training.
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How does Merck successfully digitalize their processes?
Recently, Merck L&D teams had a few issues to solve: reduce paper waste, choose the correct tools for training and development, and reduce errors from labor-intensive manual training.
Back in 2017 Eric Pithon, QA Training Manager at Merck Group, tried to create video tutorials with multiple different tools. It was time consuming, not very professional and archaic. He envisioned information at Merck being as easily accessible as YouTube trainings he would find in his personal life, for example, to change brakes on his bicycle.
Before Speach, Merck employees would have a paper manual and in-person trainings. "There were a lot of human errors" and paper waste. Pharma is a highly regulated industry that creates tons of paper.
Merck L&D team realized quickly that they must develop training videos on site in order to be GxP compliant, agile, and efficient.
They were looking for a solution that had the potential to reduce waste, reduce errors, and provide the tools needed to capture and share subject matter expertise internally.
Merck created the role of "Digitizer," one in each department (quality, production, engineering, maintenance, etc...) to create and share the first Speaches. Departments put a call out to ask for interested candidates to volunteer to take the lead as Digitizers and Speachmakers (people who will create the speaches, the video trainings).
These first Speachmakers created a snowball effect that inspired colleagues after them to capture and share their own knowledge. “Speach is more interactive than traditional PowerPoint presentations, which especially makes sense for software and other hands-on trainings,” according to the Merck QA training team. They also like Speach for the easiest and quickest adoption of the platform.
Digitizers and Speachmakers record Speaches on shop floors, manufacturing floors, at desks, and in all sorts of environments. This agility helps video tutorials to be GxP compliant.
Before a Speach is published, it must go through an approval workflow. Digitizers will check each others' trainings to make sure nothing was missed and the rules were followed.
Before someone creates a Speach they must know:
1.What's the subject?
2.What are the objectives?
3. What skills are going to be taught?
4. What is the plan for teaching these skills?
5. Is your audio quality high?
6. How to Make it engaging ?
Amélie Caspar, Quality System Engineer at Merck Group, said "We improved the quality of our training and gained a lot of time because we have transformed in-person training courses into digital ones."
With Speach, Merck had the right tool to digitize paper processes, reduce errors due to paper-based manual training processes, and efficiently train their workforce with GxP-certified video training.
Now that Merck has deployed video versions of official procedures and instructions, as opposed to written documentation, the new flexible video system allows employees to find the information instantly .
The snowball effect created from the initial Digitizers of Merck departments fostered an environment where employees feel safe and empowered to create and share their own expertise. Employees had an easy time adopting Speach as a new software tool.
“I dream it, you did it! Speach makes the work instructions visual and change our way to train people. Speach helps us reduce our human errors, improve the quality of our trainings, plus we save a lot of time by digitalizing our in-person trainings. ”
– Eric Pithon, QA Training Manager, Merck
– Amélie Caspar, Quality System Engineer, Merck
Travel and logistics costs are drastically reduced thanks to online training
Skill improvement guarantees the operational excellence of all employees
All employees are onboarded through Speach video tutorials
Speaches enable continuous learning and can be accessed on desktop, tablet or smartphone
