How Viva Topics Helps Your Frontline Manufacturing Team

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: New blog articles in Microsoft Tech Community.

Manufacturing covers a wide array of capabilities from creating chemicals, to consumer products and packaging, to heavy duty equipment and more. It’s a diverse industry with a lot of technology and equipment that needs to be maintained, fixed, or built from scratch.  Any downtime on equipment is lost production and revenue.

 

The need to find knowledge at one’s fingertips has been here for some time but that doesn’t mean it’s always the right information at the right time. The way we work is evolving. Processes are changing, some potentially more complicated, the amount of data created is growing exponentially and external factors are pushing organizations to be more resilient, to respond and adapt on the fly. These changes to how we work means that finding this knowledge quickly and effectively is more important than ever. This post will take a look at one of the most common scenarios for manufacturing organizations, a piece of equipment goes down. When this happens, every minute of downtime has tangible and economic consequences. To get things up and running again an employee may need one of, or all of the following.

 

  • Experts
  • Documentation
  • Maintenance Records
  • Parts or Part Availability

 

Sometimes this knowledge is just known, sometimes there are large manuals and paper records at the piece of equipment already, but most often the information is in many different locations and difficult to find. Think about how this might impact new employees as well. Newer teammates might not know where to go or aren’t well versed in the equipment to quickly troubleshoot without assistance. Imagine the difference in a world where that information is succinctly aggregated, up-to-date, and available for the frontline worker to quickly get the equipment back online no matter if they are a new employee or a seasoned veteran. Then imagine a world where this aggregation of resources is done automatically.

 

Enter Viva Topics, an intelligent solution to a complex need. Surfacing the correct and relevant information versus leaving it to a user to search and hope they find what they need.

 

Viva Topics builds a knowledge index from across various repositories including SharePoint to identify and understand important terms and phrases to an organization. Organizations can also provide a list of key terms to begin to build their knowledge network. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence begin to piece together the supporting resources from documents that already exist within SharePoint into what are called Topic pages. These Topic pages live in SharePoint but the terms themselves will be exposed in SharePoint, Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Yammer and more. When users see a word or phrase, they don’t recognize they can hover over that word and be presented with a topic card providing a high-level description, potential experts, and relevant documents to learn more. They then have the option to drill into the topic page for more detail. This really lowers the time to finding relevant information, enabling them to be more productive and knowledgeable.

 

Today Viva Topics can aggregate content from across Microsoft 365, but it will also have the ability to aggregate content from other sources in the near future. Let’s look at what we can see today. The example below shows a topic and its associated Topic Card providing information at a click glance.

 

Topic Card PreviewTopic Card Preview

In this example there is an issue with a specific pump that supports the overall cooling system for a manufacturing facility. A frontline worker on the shop floor noticed a leak coming from the pump during a safety walk and needed to find more out about the pump and potentially submit a maintenance request. They quickly locate the topic page for the model of pump they are looking at and find a number of resources directly from that page including the ability to create a ticket if needed.

 

Topic Page including description and curated contentTopic Page including description and curated content

This page will also provide a way for workers to ask questions directly, helping to build a tacit knowledge base where best answers are associated to the questions. Also, on this page we see “Pinned people”. These are experts associated to the topic that can provide additional insight. Quickly seeing there is an engineer the user could click on their name and open their profile so they can start a chat conversation or even start a call for a timelier response.

Q&A and Expert ProfilesQ&A and Expert Profiles

While waiting for a response the worker may also choose to scroll further down the page to find additional documentation or other locations they could access for more information like related sites. Coming in the near future articles from other systems like ServiceNow could be exposed inline with the files and pages sections.

Associated resourcesAssociated resources

If the worker wants to understand what other systems, the 5689 Cooling Pump is associated with they can view those related topics at the bottom of the page and of course this pump is associated with the Plant Cooling System.

Related TopicsRelated Topics

In this scenario a frontline employee would have quick access to the resources they need in one location and if that wasn’t enough an easy way to contact experts to dive deeper into the problem. As mentioned in the beginning, information is everywhere, but it's not necessarily relevant or the most up-to-date resource which can increase the time it takes to locate the right data. Even finding experts can be challenging having to leap from one contact to the next before you find the person you need. Take a look at your processes and data access today. Do you see similar challenges?

 

Check out this customer story from Northumbrian Water that leverages Topics and Syntex

 

In the coming months we will see more capabilities come to Topics as they will start to show in other services and provide other avenues for connecting people and knowledge.

 

Roadmap:

For the full Viva Topics public roadmap check out Microsoft 365 Roadmap | Microsoft 365

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