Needed to provide thousands of maintenance procedures, but they took half a day each.

What was going wrong

A chip plant asked ABM for a written procedure for every machine it maintains. Each one is a step by step guide a technician follows, and each one needs a matching test that proves the technician can do the job.

A writer took about four hours to get one procedure to a first draft, then about half an hour more to make the test. The plan needed thousands of documents.

Every document started from a blank page, and that is where the hours went.

What I found

The writers already knew the answers. They were spending their four hours typing what they knew into the right sections, headings, template and wording.

The tests were worse. Nobody wrote one from scratch. They opened an old test, copied it, and edited it to match the new machine, which is how small errors travel from document to document.

So most of the four hours went to formatting, and a machine can do that. The part only an expert can do, reading a draft and saying yes or no, never took much of the time.

What changed

A writer now pastes what they know about the job. The tool puts it into ABM's sections and hands back a Word file already on their template. One more click reads that procedure and drafts the matching test, with the answer key and the sign-off pages, tied to the procedure it came from.

On one morning in July, ABM timed it. A procedure took twelve minutes with heavy edits, and three minutes with none. It used to take four hours. A test took three minutes instead of twenty eight.

Four hundred documents have been built this way so far. The number on this page counts those and nothing else, so none of it is a forecast. ABM chose to keep building with it after using it, and that is the part I would pay attention to.

The tool certifies nothing. Every document leaves marked as a draft, and an expert signs it off before anyone uses it, the same as before. Only the work ahead of that review changed.