07:42TuesdayP-3
The seal starts weeping onto the plinth.
Nine years without trouble. By eight the line behind it has stopped and a supervisor is asking for an ETA.
Fault · mechanical sealScroll — this pump has a year to get through
The actual problem
Three things are true on every site we walk, and none of them are solved by writing another document.
The technician who can hear a failing bearing learned it across nineteen years. None of it is written down, and the write-up never happens, because the write-up is always less urgent than the line that's down right now.
Last revised before two retrofits and a drive change. Nobody trusts it, so nobody opens it, so it drifts further out of date. The real procedure is a photo of a whiteboard in someone's phone.
Someone did record the rebuild. Nobody is going to scrub through it at 3am with a pump down and a supervisor asking for an ETA. Recording it was never the hard part — finding the forty seconds that matter is.
| Stage | Minutes |
|---|---|
| Walk to the control room | 4 |
| Find the binder or the drive | 9 |
| Realise it is the wrong revision | 6 |
| Call someone who has done it | 11 |
| Re-read the right step | 5 |
| Today, total | 35 |
| With Procedo, total | 1 |
The product
The video, the transcript and the approved procedure are the same object seen three ways — and the chat answers from all three. Switch between them.
04:02Right, before you touch anything — that gland's still got pressure behind it.
04:18Don't put your fingers on the carbon face. I've seen a brand new seal weep because somebody picked it up wrong.
04:35Lint-free wipe and IPA on the sleeve. All the way round, down to bare metal.
04:58If there's any grit left under that elastomer the faces won't close. That's your leak.
05:14Nuts go down in a star, quarter turn each, eighteen newton-metres. Not one side first.
Mechanical seal replacement — centrifugal pump P-3
MNT-SOP-0142 · rev 3 · APPROVED 11 Mar by A. Fernandes
ISO 55001 · OSHA 29 CFR 1910.147 · effective 12 Mar
Replace the mechanical seal on P-3 without damaging the shaft sleeve or disturbing coupling alignment.
Personal lock and tag · lint-free wipes and IPA · torque wrench 5–25 N·m · replacement seal kit 3196-MS-2 · dial indicator.
Weeping after start-up → contaminated face, grit under the elastomer, or uneven gland torque. Re-check in that order.
Content hash sha256 9f2c4e1b…41ab7d30
Computed over the number, version, title and steps. Edit any step and the hash moves — which is what the audit chain watches.
P-3 is weeping from the seal after last night's rebuild. What did we miss?
Three things cause weeping on a 3196 straight after a rebuild. In order of likelihood:
Confidence91% · 2 sources
The mechanism
Drawn as the machine it would be if you had to build it out of metal: a reel of tape, a reading head on a rail, an index drum of eleven chapters, an engraved plate of steps. The lit rod is the citation.
How it works
Three steps, and only the first one asks anything of the person who knows the machine.
Shop noise, accents, three people talking over each other. The industry vocabulary is loaded before transcription, so the words come out right.
Purpose, scope, prerequisites, numbered steps, safety warnings and troubleshooting — the sections your framework requires, filled from what was said and shown.
A draft answers nobody. It becomes the live procedure when a named person approves that revision — electronically, where the framework demands it.
Industry packs
A pack sets the vocabulary loaded before transcription, the sections the SOP must carry, the numbering, and whether an electronic signature is required before a procedure goes live.
Equipment auto-categorised across PLC, motors and drives, pumps, hydraulics, conveyors, boilers, switchgear, presses and safety work. Lock-out/tag-out is flagged as a hazard rather than buried in a step.
Approval required · signature optional
Written for sites carrying USFDA 483 risk. References and attachments are required sections, not optional ones, and every record carries ALCOA+ attributes so the trail stands up in an inspection.
Electronic signature required
HPLC, GC-MS, UV-Vis and FTIR service work. Column installation, inlet liners, septa and detector baselines are in the decoder's vocabulary before a word is transcribed — which is the difference between a usable transcript and a funny one.
Electronic signature required
Where it fits
Your work orders stay where they are. Procedo is the layer that makes the procedure attached to them worth opening.
Nobody has to change how they work. The technician still opens the work order. The planner still schedules in the CMMS. The only new habit is recording the job once, by the person who already knows how to do it.
Accuracy and control
This is the question that decides the deal, so here is the whole answer rather than a reassuring sentence.
Steps are drafted from the transcript and the frames, not from what a model knows about pumps in general. If the recording never states a torque figure, the step doesn't carry one — it says the figure is missing, which is a useful thing for a reviewer to see.
Every answer carries its sources and a confidence. Below the threshold, or with no passage in an approved SOP behind it, the chat says it doesn't have that rather than producing a plausible paragraph. Silence is the correct output at 3am.
A SHA-256 is computed over the number, version, title and steps — content_hash. Change a torque value and the hash moves. The audit chain records the move, so a silent edit isn't a thing that can happen.
Procedo drafts. A named reviewer approves. On pharma and lab packs that approval is an electronic signature, and the approved revision is the only one retrieval will touch. The responsibility stays where your framework already puts it.
Compliance
Six things an inspector asks for, answered by the system rather than by a person going through folders.
Every upload, edit, approval, question and answer is written to a chained log. Altering an earlier entry breaks the chain, and the break is visible.
A draft is a draft. It answers nobody until a named reviewer approves that specific revision, and the record says who and when.
Whisper and the drafting model run on your hardware if you need them to. For defence and pharma sites, nothing crosses the boundary.
A contractor on the packing hall doesn't see switchgear procedures. Roles map to areas, and every view is logged against a person.
Pharma and lab packs require an electronic signature before a revision becomes effective, with the signer, meaning and timestamp bound to the record.
Procedures, revision history and the full trail export for an inspector, or for the day you decide to run this somewhere else.
| Time | Actor | Action | Object | Chain |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 11 Mar 14:22 | A. Fernandes | approve | rev 3 | 9f2c…41ab |
| 11 Mar 14:08 | R. Mehta | edit | step 8 torque 14 → 18 N·m | 41ab…7d30 |
| 11 Mar 09:51 | S. Kulkarni | comment | hazard before step 3 | 7d30…b612 |
| 11 Mar 06:14 | procedo | draft | rev 1 generated | b612…0c87 |
| 11 Mar 05:58 | R. Mehta | upload | P3-seal-replacement.mp4 | 0c87…genesis |
Deployment
There is no data migration and no integration project to start. The first SOP exists before anything is installed.
The fourth row is the one that matters. Questions nobody can answer are a list of the recordings you should make next — which is the first time most sites have had a ranked, evidence-backed answer to “what should we document?”
What it's worth
The cost isn't the software. It's the half-hour a technician spends finding the right procedure while the line is stopped. Put your own figures in.
Assuming Procedo answers in under a minute — which is what a cited answer against an approved SOP actually takes.
We don't publish other companies' savings figures, because they tell you nothing about your plant. Run it with your worst line and your real downtime rate.
Packaging
Charging by the seat would mean charging you for technicians asking questions, which is the one behaviour the whole product exists to encourage.
Prove it on the line that hurts most, with a fixed scope and a fixed fee.
Fixed fee · no auto-renewal
Everything one plant records, with the integrations and the sign-off your auditor expects.
Annual · per site
Several plants, shared procedures, and the environments that can't touch a network.
Annual · negotiated
No per-question or per-minute charge. Transcription on your own hardware costs you electricity, not licence fees — so the more your team asks, the better the deal gets rather than the worse.
What you're already thinking
Asked on every call, so answered here instead of on the call.
They all are. Compressor noise, phone held sideways, half of it in Marathi. That's the normal case, not the edge case — send us the worst one you have and judge the output rather than the promise.
Then it doesn't. Transcription, drafting and search all run on hardware you own, inside your boundary. The hosted option exists because some sites prefer it, not because anything requires it.
You have documents. The question is whether a technician on nights can get the right step out of them in under a minute, and whether the document matches the machine after the last retrofit. Procedo is about retrieval and currency, not page count.
That's the right fear, and it's why nothing publishes without a named approval, every answer carries its sources and confidence, and an answer with no passage behind it in an approved SOP says so instead of guessing.
Next step
Pick your worst recording — the noisy one, the one where three people talk over each other, the one nobody has ever watched twice. We'll send back the procedure Procedo writes from it, with the hazards it flagged and the timestamps it cited. No deck, no discovery call first.
Typical turnaround 24 hours
Recording deleted after review unless you ask us to keep it
Procedo is a product of Ailoitte