When you have to on-board more than 700,000 people a year, training becomes a very, very big deal. Think about it: if each of those people is earning $10 an hour and it takes 10 hours to train someone before they can be productive, then you're looking at $70 million a year in training costs. If you can shave even one hour off the average training time, then you're looking at some very real money represented in savings.

That very real money is part of the reason that McDonalds Corporation pays such close attention to the technology used to train new employees for the corporate office and in franchise stores. Jack Sylvester is in charge of that technology and recently InformationWeek ran an article on the new training infrastructure McDonalds has put in place.

In that new infrastructure McDonalds is using a platform from Inkling, a SaaS provider that wants companies to use documents, not files, as the atomic units of information. To explain what that means, and how McDonalds is using the platform, this episode of InformationWeek's Expert Voice brings you Jack Sylvester and Matt McKiness, founder and CEO of Inkling, to talk about the new training infrastructure.

Training materials and operational manuals have moved from paper to mobile devices, and that has allowed training to move from back rooms to the kitchen and front of store where trainees can work "shoulder to shoulder" with their more experienced teammates. The result, according to Sylvester, is faster training, better results, and more involved, motivated team members.

How does your organization train new employees? Have you exchanged files for documents in your workflow? Let us know in the comments -- and remember, you can subscribe to InformationWeek's Expert Voice on iTunes or Google Play.