Case 03 · Manufacturing
A global industrial automation manufacturer. The process was engineering documentation to ANSI/ISA-88. The number was minutes per document.
The situation
Every project produced control documentation that had to conform to ANSI/ISA-88 before it could ship. Engineers did the conversion by hand: reading source specifications, restructuring them to the standard, checking terminology, and correcting inconsistencies. It took about two hours per document, it scaled linearly with project volume, and it consumed exactly the engineers whose time was most valuable elsewhere.
The baseline
We measured documents per month, minutes per document by type and complexity, rework and review cycles, and the fully loaded engineering cost of the activity. Engineering leadership and finance co-signed it. The number was minutes per compliant document, at equal or better review pass rate.
The change
First the process: the standard was decomposed into the decisions it actually requires, and the steps that existed only to catch earlier mistakes were designed out. Then the build: structured extraction from source specifications, generation against the standard with terminology enforced, and a review step where the engineer checks rather than composes. Presets were built for recurring project types, so the system improves as the library grows.
The reading
Three minutes per document against a two-hour baseline, at review pass rates equal to or better than the manual process. The engineering hours released went back into project work rather than into documentation.
What they own
The generation system, the preset library built from their own project history, the terminology and standards configuration, and the harness that verifies output quality as the standard evolves.
Start
If this looks like a process you run, the fastest next step is a conversation about the number that would matter.