Securing Knowledge — Before It Walks Out the Door
Mega-driver: capture the knowledge that drains away daily.
The most important knowledge is not in the Word SOPs. It is in people's heads: the real tricks, the typical edge cases, the right reactions when the machine behaves strangely. And it drains away through three channels.
1. Retirement & demographics: the baby-boomer wave 2025–2032 — experienced knowledge carriers leave, their knowledge leaves with them.
2. Turnover & change: technicians and operators move on — every departure takes experience with it.
3. Never documented: the most common phrase in our customer calls: "Documenting with Word is too time-consuming → so it is not done → knowledge exists only in heads → it gets forgotten."
The core claim (formulated by customers themselves): Because GIRI documents up to 10x faster, documentation actually happens.
- The "irreplaceable" foreman retires in 2 years — with no trained successor
- Technicians or operators quit — every departure takes experience along
- When person X is sick, the shift runs at half productivity
- For rare faults, the same person always gets called
- Documentation happens "someday" — meaning never, because Word makes it too costly
- Your SOPs cover only 60% of reality — the rest is experience
1. Identify the knowledge carriers: the 3–5 people nothing runs without.
2. Plan recording days — not as "training" but as "we are documenting your work".
3. Join them at the machine: let them show, keep asking — "Why do you do it that way?"
4. Iterate with successors: their questions surface the truly deep tricks.
5. Structure the library so the knowledge stays findable.
- 80% of critical knowledge documented before it drains away
- Successors get access to knowledge, not just SOPs
- Resilience against sickness, vacation, and resignations
- Appreciation: the experts' experience is preserved
- Mid-sized companies with an aging workforce
- Teams with noticeable turnover (service, logistics, manufacturing)
- Industries with long onboarding times (machine building, specialty production)
- Plants running for 20+ years with lots of tacit knowledge
- Waiting until the expert resigns or announces retirement — too late by then
- Letting the expert document alone — join them at the machine
- Thinking SOPs are enough — only questions surface the implicit knowledge
- Treating it as an HR project — it is a productivity project