Plant Services - August 2008 - (Page 26) Lose It Six ways to capture knowledge – or do without By Paul Studebaker, CMRP, Editor in Chief Don’t he current generation of experienced plant professionals is being lost to retirement, displaced by job relocations and antiquated by advances in manufacturing technology. e supply of appropriately skilled, educated and trained personnel is, at best, strained, and in many places, totally inadequate. T Corporate knowledge sources Employees’ brains 42% Paper documentation 26% Electronic knowledge 12% Electronic documentation 20% Figure 1. Employees’ brains remain by far the largest repository of the knowledge companies rely on for a competitive edge. (Source: The Delphi Group) An April 2008 survey of 100 senior manufacturing executives indicates that in the past three years, the need to replace lost skilled workers has grown from a concern to a crisis. e executives say the shortfall will cost their companies an average of $52 million, and even more, $100 million, for the nation’s largest companies that report more than $1 billion in annual revenue. e benchmark survey, commissioned by Advanced Technology Services Inc. (ATS) and conducted by Nielsen Research, says that during the next five years, about 40% of your skilled labor force will retire. We can be confident that societal, government and market forces eventually will close the gap, but in the meantime, how much institutional knowledge can you afford to let walk out the door? Most would agree that a company’s competitive edge relies heavily on its intellectual capital – the knowledge it possesses within its organization – and much of that resides in its employees (Figure 1). It makes sense to take steps now to capture the departing expert’s critical know-how. e same strategies and infrastructure you use for capturing knowledge also can provide a way to gather and compare alternative approaches, distill best practices and distribute them to A 26 .PLANTSERVICES. http://www.PLANTSERVICES.com
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