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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, was tasked with “creating video tutorials with absolutely archaic tools.” Eric Pithon envisioned information at Merck being as easily accessible as YouTube trainings he would find in his personal life, for example, to change brakes.
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 notoriously old school, a highly regulated industry that creates tons of waste paper.
Around the same time, Eric Pithon realized that Merck must develop training videos on site in order to be GxP compliant, agile, and efficient.
After attending a Speach workshop, he reached out to the Speach team right away. He realized that Speach 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.
These leaders 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 Eric Pithon. Teams at Merck also took notice and quickly adopted the Speach 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 fun ?
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 tutorials.
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 info quickly.
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 content. Employees had an easy time adopting Speach as a new software tool.
“Speach is more interactive than traditional powerpoint presentations, which especially makes sense for software and other hands-on trainings”
– Eric Pithon, QA Training Manager, Merck Group
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
