In a three-part series with Amy Bonner, VP of PRINTING AI, PRINTING United Alliance, we dig into the importance of preserving institutional knowledge. As experienced employees retire, change roles, or leave a company, print businesses have to grapple with knowledge transfer, and in many cases, they don’t realize what expertise is at risk until it’s already walking out the door.
By taking the right approach and using the right tools and resources, print businesses can begin organizing, preserving, and sharing key knowledge with current and future employees. In Part 1 of Preserving Institutional Knowledge, Bonner shares what print organizations risk losing if they don’t act.
What types of institutional or tribal knowledge are most commonly lost in print businesses when experienced employees leave?
Five things, and none of them live in a manual. Substrate intuition. The operator who knows a certain paper will give you head strikes on an inkjet press above 60% humidity, not because a spec sheet told them, but because they lived through the mistake once and never forgot it. Color management judgment. When to trust the ICC profile and when to override it because a specific client’s brand manager has a preference that lives nowhere in the job spec. Production exception logic. The diagnostic sequence that takes a problem from two hours to 20 minutes because somebody learned it the hard way five years ago and never wrote it down. Customer and job history. Which clients underestimate quantities, which account managers’ files always come in missing bleed. And vendor instincts. Who to call at seven in the morning when the primary substrate is on backorder and you need an answer before the press starts.
None of it is in the ERP. None of it is in the SOPs. It is in people, and it is walking out the door on a schedule most operations aren’t tracking.
Read this full article on Printing Impressions, a publication of PRINTING United Alliance, ASI’s strategic partner.
