Laura recently joined up with the team at @satsearchco to share best practices when drafting work instructions and test procedures for space missions. Read more on their website:

You’ll also find a short practical guide for organizations of every size to level up their management of operational procedures. ➡️ Check out the full portfolio of commercially-available capabilities offered by Epsilon3 to tackle these challenges:

📖 The procedural debt in drafting work instructions that’s killing space missions - the latest spotlight article is now live on our blog! Find the article here: https://t.co/16aRky245J

Epsilon3 onboarding = 2–3 short calls + automated imports + minimal training. You don’t need a task force. You don’t need six months. You don’t need to pause anything. If you think you’re “too busy” for a better system, you’re actually too busy not to adopt one.

Onboarding takes forever Procedures drift Errors multiply Teams lose track of who did what You play “find the failure” every week Here’s what teams discover when they switch: Implementation isn’t the heavy lift. Running without structure is.

Totally understandable until you zoom out: The reason you’re overwhelmed is the exact reason you need standardization. When everything lives in Word docs, tribal knowledge, old PDFs, and half-complete spreadsheets…

Most manufacturing, test, and ops leaders don’t reject better systems because they don’t want them. They reject them because they’re underwater. “We’re slammed with testing.” “We’re rolling out our ERP.” “We can’t take on one more thing.”

If you’re scaling headcount or preparing for bigger contracts, staying on Path 1 is the real risk.

“Our team is old-school.” → They don’t hate software. They hate bad software. You don’t need the perfect tool. You need one that makes skipped steps, missing data, and traceability gaps hard to happen.

This is where platforms like Epsilon3 live. And before you say: “We’re too small.” → If you’re big enough to lose money on mistakes, you’re big enough for structure. “We’re too busy to implement.” → That’s why setup is 2–3 short calls and automated imports.

Path 2: “We need a real system.” Same complexity, but now you have: Standardized, version-controlled procedures Full traceability from part to assembly to operator Clear status on tests, ops, maintenance, and CAPAs Training and onboarding that doesn’t require heroics

A step gets skipped and nobody knows why A part fails and you can’t trace its history Leadership asks, “Are we compliant?” and you hope the answer is yes

Path 1: “We’re fine with what we have.” Procedures in Word / PDFs Inventory in Excel Schedules in someone’s head Quality tracked in random Jira tickets It “works”… until:

Your ops will break in one of two ways: slowly through spreadsheets, or suddenly in an audit. If you’re leading manufacturing, testing, or production/mission/launch ops, you’re probably living in one of these two worlds:

Check out Epsilon3 Changelog 91, featuring: ✔️ User Skills ✔️ Trickle Down and Sum Up on Assemblies ✔️ Work Order Schedules ✔️ Inventory Details Block Improvements ➡️ https://t.co/0oxSYbcUi3

If that’s the gap in your world, it’s probably time to upgrade the way your organization actually runs.

On the other side of this: -Every step is tracked. -Every part has a story. -Every operator knows exactly what “right” looks like. -Audits turn from panic… into paperwork. You don’t fix root-cause with more hustle. You fix it with systems that tell you exactly what happened.

-Too expensive → Compared to what? One slipped launch window? One scrapped batch? -Too busy → You’ll always be “too busy” while running on tools that create more fires. -Security concerns → Epsilon3 runs FedRAMP High + on-prem options. This is literally our lane.

“We think people are following procedures, but we can’t prove it.” “Our inventory story falls apart the second someone asks for history.” “We’d get hammered if we had a surprise audit today.” And the objections are always the same:

If it takes you days to reconstruct a failure, that’s not a people problem. That’s a systems problem. Here’s what I hear from teams before they switch: