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The silver wave is heading for your factory too: what now?

You’ve known for a while now. In eight months, he’s retiring. ‘Bob’, who has been working on line 3 for 38 years. Bob, who can tell at a glance whether the mixer is running right. Who can explain within five minutes why you had quality deviations last week and what you need to do to prevent them. That Bob is about to leave, and he’s taking all his knowledge with him.

Have you really got it covered?

Of course you have it “covered”. By now, Dennis has been shadowing Bob. Dennis is motivated, eager to learn, and intelligent. After six months of working alongside him, Dennis knows where all the buttons are. He can operate the machine according to the standard procedure. But in practice, here’s what happens:

Month 1–2: Dennis watches Bob work. He learns where the buttons are, how to start the machine, and what the standard procedure is. He asks questions. Bob patiently explains.

Month 3–4: Dennis can operate the machine independently, as long as everything runs normally. He feels competent. Bob is satisfied: “He’s doing well.”

Month 5–6: Dennis gradually takes on more tasks. Bob gets more time for improvement projects. The handover seems successful.

Month 8: Bob has retired. Dennis is now running things on his own.

Month 9: Something goes wrong. A deviation that Bob would have resolved within five minutes, but Dennis doesn’t see the signal. Or he sees it, but doesn’t know what it means. Or he thinks he knows what to do, but misses the nuance that makes the difference between “problem fixed” and “root cause addressed.”

Dennis lacks the 38 years of experience that Bob carries in his head. Result? Downtime. Quality deviations. Costs. And in the worst case: Dennis getting frustrated because he feels like he’s failing.

The silver wave has just begun.
In 5 years, 30% of today’s experts will have retired. In 10 years, that’ll be 50%

The real problem: decision knowledge vs. procedural knowledge

This situation is playing out right now in hundreds of factories across the country. The silver wave, the large-scale outflow of experienced employees, poses a real risk to the continuity of your production.

Why? Because critical experiential knowledge is walking out the door. Knowledge that isn’t captured in procedures and work instructions. Knowledge that doesn’t just tell you what to do, but also why and when you do it. We call that decision knowledge.

Example:

The procedure says: “In case of a temperature deviation >2°C, press the reset button.”

Bob’s decision knowledge says: “If the temperature deviates by more than 2°C and you see that the humidity sensor is also above 65% and it’s a hot day, then it’s the climate control system causing it. Resetting won’t do anything. You need to check the cooling first. But if the humidity sensor is reading normally, then the problem is in the mixer itself, you should reset, but also immediately check whether the seal on the heating element is still in good condition.”

This isn’t written down anywhere. It was built up over 38 years of experience, thousands of situations, hundreds of times trying something that didn’t work and learning from it what does. And this is exactly what disappears when Henk leaves.

Why documentation alone won’t cut it

“But we document everything!” I can hear you think. And that’s true. You probably have:

Standard operating procedures (SOPs)
Troubleshooting guides
Settings reference sheets
Flowcharts
Maybe even videos

And yet, it doesn’t work.

Why? Because experts can’t describe how they work. They operate at a level of intuition that they themselves aren’t consciously aware of.

Ask Bob: “How do you know whether the mixer is running right?” He’ll say: “You just hear it.” But what he doesn’t realise is that at the same time he’s looking at three displays, monitoring the consistency of the product, checking whether the dosing rates match what he expects based on that morning’s outside temperature, and making his call based on a pattern he’s seen a thousand times before.

Ask him to document that and what you get is: “Listen for unusual sound at mixer.” That’s not enough to bring Dennis up to the same level.

The real solution: systematic knowledge management

The only way to truly solve this problem is to systematically capture the decision knowledge of your experts. Not by asking “what do you do?”, but by finding out “how do you decide?”.

This requires a different approach than the instructions you’re used to:

Don’t: “Explain how the machine works”
Do: “Tell me about the last time line 3 came to an unexpected stop. What did you see? What did you do first? Why not something else? What told you that was the right approach?”

By extracting this knowledge from the heads of your experienced experts and making it available 24/7 to everyone else, you give all the Dennises of this world the chance to get up to Bob’s level in no time.

How do you extract knowledge from people’s heads?

Discover the ELICIT method.

Our unique approach

Results at other organisations

FrieslandCampina

At FrieslandCampina Beilen, they captured decision knowledge for their production process. The results were clearly visible:

“We’re seeing a clear reduction in the number of support requests coming into our auxiliary services,” says the process operator. “Because we’re able to restore deviations faster, the margin of error shrinks and overall quality improves.”

Operators can now understand cause-and-effect relationships on their own. When foaming occurs in the process, they know which steps to follow. The result: faster recovery from deviations and better overall quality.

JDE Joure (Douwe Egberts, L’Or, Pickwick)

At JDE Joure, new operators can now easily identify problems themselves and see how to resolve them. As a result, they only call on the most experienced employees when it’s truly necessary.

Team leader Raymond van Dijk: “The biggest win is: fewer questions and shorter downtimes. We arrive at solutions faster and see fewer quality deviations,” says Van Dijk. “And because problems are resolved more quickly, the efficiency of the production environment goes up as well.”

What can you do today?

The silver wave isn’t stopping. In five years, 30% of today’s experts will have retired. In ten years, it’ll be 50%. And bringing in new people isn’t a solution if the knowledge of departing experts disappears with them. The question isn’t whether the silver wave will hit your factory. The question is: are you prepared when it does?

Concerned? Then there are three things you can do right now:

Identify your vulnerabilities
Who are your experts? Not only people who are about to retire, but also people who hold critical knowledge that exists nowhere else. Ask yourself: if this person were out of the picture tomorrow, how long would it take before we’re running at the same level again?
Stop relying on shadowing as your only handover strategy
Shadowing is useful for procedural knowledge. But for decision knowledge, you need a structured extraction method. That knowledge has to be made explicit before you can transfer it.
Start small, but start now
You don’t need to capture all the knowledge from all your experts at once. Start with one critical process. One expert who’s leaving soon. One product with a high rate of quality deviations. Test the approach, measure the impact, and scale from there.

Want to know how to systematically capture the decision knowledge of your experts?

ELICIT helps you extract and capture the critical knowledge from the heads of your experts in just 5 interviews, ready for your team to use. No months-long processes, no thick manuals that nobody reads, but a single interactive model you can put to work straight away.

Curious what that looks like? Check out our demo.

Relevant subjects

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Reduce workload of process technologists

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