The “knowledge tax” is bigger than it looks. Unplanned downtime tied to human factors costs manufacturers billions every year. Add in aging teams, scattered documentation, and hours lost to “who knows this?” and the real bill is staggering.
In custom manufacturing, it bites hardest: every job looks different, and the answers live across PDFs, drawings, emails, photos, even handwritten notes. The result is heroic individuals carrying institutional memory… and a system that doesn’t.
The companies winning are treating knowledge as infrastructure: capture it, search it, re-use it, and let it shape how work gets done. First-pass quality improves, quoting speeds up, onboarding shortens, and weekends stay weekends.
I pulled together a pragmatic breakdown of the problem + a rollout plan (pilot → prove value → expand). If you’re in manufacturing, this will feel familiar.
👉 Read: https://lnkd.in/eTiWA7nR
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