At two different companies I’ve been tasked with building (or rebuilding) their entire library of Standard Operating Procedures and training processes. Frequently, I shadowed employees in their duties to ensure I had the most accurate information in the SOP. Additionally, I always talk with employees and ask: “What would make this process better? Is there any equipment we can add to make this easier or more efficient?”

At Nelson Laboratories, I was asked to spearhead a project to provide news to employees. As a result, I designed, edited, and distributed The Nelson Standard, a monthly newsletter showcasing company changes and employee accomplishments. It would also contain an article about a department in the company, or a historical article discussing early laboratory work. Each issue ended with a custom meme related to a topic covered in the newsletter.

One of my hobbies is drawing, so I utilized this to add some more fun and engagement to our training videos. Nelson Laboratories also had a yearly employee film festival. My cartoon, a parody of ‘Animaniacs’ featuring some failed cartoons designed by the Marketing department, went on to win first place!

At one company, I found a critical piece of documentation had been created by an old (and since discontinued) clip-art program. Grids for documentation were just boxes created by hand and slid into areas where they more-or-less overlapped. When entering new information regarding the product, the manufacture data, and so forth, it had to be fixed on every single page. I was able to recreate the entire document in Excel. I included new fields for better documentation, removed outdated information, and generally improved the document flow. Also, utilizing lookups, when the data on the first page of the document was updated, every change carried through the rest without any additional manual changes needed.