Miguel Gato Amaro

One of the things that determines how well a business can scale is where the company’s hard knowledge lives. Is it concentrated in a few employees, or is it widespread and owned by the “company” through internal libraries, regular training, technical procedures or other means?

This project was my first at Electromatic, and it was basically about decentralizing technical knowledge and preparing the company to grow faster and more sustainably.

The issue

When I joined the company, a few red flags caught my attention. The most critical was how concentrated technical knowledge was: twelve employees depended heavily on just three people: the CEO and founder, an administrative employee, and a senior technician.

The company had no clear procedures, no code of conduct and no proper technical documentation, and the daily pressure of operations encouraged a reactive mindset. In this mode, the fastest path is always the one chosen, such as asking the colleague who knows, which only concentrates knowledge further.

This situation made the company vulnerable to 2 main risks:

• If one of those 3 people left, the company would lose a lot of know-how and productivity.
• New employees would struggle to adapt and develop, because knowledge was basically passed on by word of mouth. Slow and inefficient.

I often observed colleagues who had little autonomy and depended almost entirely on this small circle of knowledge holders. This had several negative impacts.

This concentration showed up in other ways as well. Another example is the unequal treatment and informal privileges that naturally emerge in a centralized structure.

It was a real constraint on the company’s growth. On top of that, service quality wasn’t consistent across teams, which made it hard to build a reliable brand.

The Pareto principle applied fully at this point: approximately 20% of the employees contributed approximately 80% of the productivity. The mission was to go against the Pareto principle.

The source of several seemingly unrelated issues lay in the very foundations of the business. There were few, if any, foundations in place, yet they were essential to the transformation that was about to take place. So we decided to start there, by building the foundations: rules and procedures.

The solution

As mentioned before, this problem came from a lack of structure at several levels.

The goal was to build a well-structured organization that, in an ideal world, would keep working even if the whole team were replaced overnight.

To achieve this, we needed the following foundations:

• Code of conduct;
• Job descriptions across the whole company, with a clear definition of tasks and responsibilities for each position;
• Procedures;
• A customized ERP solution to promote compliance with procedures;
• Decentralized leadership;
• An internal Academy to promote practical knowledge sharing;
• An internal technical library and lessons-learned system.

All these foundations were intertwined and wouldn’t have the same impact if implemented separately. They had to be built at the same time.

We looked for solutions that could address more than one foundation at once, to be more efficient. These are the solutions we found and implemented, in this order:

1. Organizational chart, job descriptions and decentralized leadership

The first foundation to set up was the organization itself. By defining a clear structure and job descriptions, we could also tackle the leadership problem.

We created a new organizational chart that split knowledge across different teams and created intermediate leadership in the process.

Job descriptions were written from scratch to match the organizational chart.

Both documents were rolled out through one-on-one meetings and maintained daily.

2. Code of conduct

The second foundation was a quick win: a simple, straightforward document with the basic rules of conduct. We started with an easily acceptable version that, over time, could be used to address specific behavioral issues.

We wrote the document, rolled it out in one-on-one meetings and then made it available on a SharePoint page.

3. Procedures & technology (internal ERP)

In today’s world, procedures and technology are completely intertwined. The best way to implement procedures is through technology. Technology is the best compliance mechanism.

We needed a database and an interface that were fast and easy to customize.

We started working on procedures, and every time one was written, our ERP was adapted to ensure compliance with it. So both were born together and stayed in sync over time.

This resulted in a document called “Internal Procedures” and in Smartic, our in-house ERP. The first version was built in SQL + MS Access, and the second was a web-based ERP with AI solutions and agents integrated.

The “Internal Procedures” document lived on a SharePoint page so it could be dynamic and easy to update. Everyone had access to the latest version and was informed of every change.

4. Internal Academy and technical documentation

These foundations were addressed with a shared solution: a SharePoint space called “Technical Area”, working as an internal library, plus regular internal training sessions to share practical knowledge. The training materials were stored in the “Technical Area”, and the area was also used during the sessions, connecting the two foundations.

The “Technical Area” held all the official technical documents, plus internal technical notes to share lessons learned. With the right incentives, it could become a very sustainable knowledge platform.

We created the Academy by inviting senior employees to be the teachers. By creating a training environment, we’d not only share knowledge but also build the team.

The outcome

All the solutions in this project were implemented in early 2022 and are still being updated and maintained until the time of this writing, october 2026. Not all of them succeeded, as we’ll see, but all of them survived.

1. Organizational chart, job descriptions and decentralized leadership

Most of the team adapted fairly well to the new structure and showed no resistance, so the implementation was successful. A few employees didn’t adapt to a more structured organization and eventually left the company.

It was only after some turnover in the team that we saw it fully in place. The main difference is that when someone joins the company, they naturally accept things “as-is”, because that’s their reference from day one.

After 4 years, the company has healthy intermediate leadership across all departments, and everyone knows their part in the mission. The team grew from 12 to 26 people and became more organized.

Knowledge became more widespread, and the company no longer depended on just a few individuals.

2. Code of conduct

The code of conduct was implemented and has been updated over time, but its impact and usefulness have been low.

It helped with specific issues but generally wasn’t taken very seriously, maybe because the company rarely punished employees who broke it. I think the benevolent attitude of the management (which I’m part of and contribute to) failed to give the code of conduct real authority.

3. Procedures & technology

The procedures were first implemented in 2022 and have been updated ever since. The implementation was successful, but the direct impact was moderate. Even though the procedures were easy to access, people didn’t check them before asking a colleague.

However, these procedures had a huge indirect impact through technology.

When the transformation strated, the company was less than 20% digitalized and still ran most of its operations on paper. Within the first 18 months, the company was fully digitalized.

I developed an in-house ERP called Smartic. It was initially built for operations but quickly expanded to run basically the whole company, from operations to financial results and analysis, to human resources and suppliers.

The first version used an SQL database with MS Access as the front-end. For the technicians in the field, the solution was Microsoft PowerApps: I built smartphone apps for them that connected to our internal database. I developed it all myself over the first 4 years. It became the brain of the company and was key to growing the team. Whenever we wanted to change a procedure, we only had to adapt the ERP to make sure everyone, from the most to the least experienced, would follow it.

In 2026, a CTO was hired to upgrade the technology to a web-based solution and implement AI agents. Smartic was fully replaced by SmarticPRO, a web-based platform with huge potential to keep developing, increase operational efficiency and build a business moat.

4. Internal Academy and technical documentation

The impact of the “Technical Area” took a while to show. When it first launched, it was missing some documents, which made it unreliable. People didn’t believe it would always have the answer. As we added more information, it became complete and people started using it more.

But the real change came when we developed an in-house AI chatbot that read all the documentation and answered technicians’ questions based on it. From then on, everyone adopted the chatbot, named Xavier, and the impact grew.

The Academy was not successful. We ran several courses with good materials and practical exercises, but the effort was always bigger than the real impact on daily operations. After 2 years of investing in and pushing the Academy, we decided we had to focus all the energy on the chatbot Xavier.

Lessons and skills learned

Through this project, I learned the following lessons:

• If people contribute to the solution, they’re more likely to accept it and try to make it work.
• It’s essential for a leader to lead by example. Actions speak louder than words.
• I found it difficult to create intermediate leadership by promoting internally, especially when the new leader has to lead their former colleagues. Only a few profiles can make this transition smoothly. Close relationships can be hard to turn into a vertical hierarchy.
• A company shouldn’t let feelings get in the way of enforcing its own rules. If any employee disrespects the code of conduct, the company has to act, and it should act according to the rules as much as possible. Even though this can penalize individuals and create some friction at the time, in the long run it creates order and sets limits. It’s good for the company’s success and for employees’ well-being, and it promotes a more disciplined culture.
• Static procedures, whether in a PDF, on a web page or on paper, don’t work anymore. Nowadays, procedures have to be built into the technology or be reactive, meaning that while an employee is doing task X, the software proactively suggests the procedure for X.
• I learned and felt first-hand the huge impact technology can have on companies. It’s the most powerful tool to create or transform companies and produce results quickly.
• An academy-like solution only works if it has some kind of evaluation system. We failed here because we assumed that since every course had a practical part, there would be learning and positive results in operations. We measured no impact, because technicians stopped practicing and eventually forgot most of what we taught. Looking back, a series of tests spread over the weeks after each course would probably have helped people retain more.

During this period, I developed the following skills:

• Project management: leading the project and the people who contributed significantly along the way;
• Leadership: positioning myself as a leader and speaking on behalf of the company on internal matters;
• Team management;
• Implementation skills: the ones I value the most. I’ve had, and seen, good ideas go to waste because of a lack of implementation skills.
• Programming and IT solutions: skills I had to develop to build the first version of Smartic and to lead the build of SmarticPRO.