When your maintenance experts leave, what else walks out the door?
Some things can’t be replaced with spare parts. In process-intensive industries, technical knowledge is everything. It’s the accumulated understanding of how systems behave, what to do when things go wrong, and how to work safely and efficiently in complex environments.
But what happens when the person who holds that knowledge walks out the door?
The hidden risk of knowledge drain
Industrial plants around the world are facing a generational shift. Experienced technicians, engineers, and supervisors are retiring. With them, decades of insight are disappearing. This isn’t just a workforce issue. It’s a maintenance challenge, a safety risk and a productivity drain.
Critical know-how often isn’t written down. It lives in people’s heads, is passed along during shift handovers, shared in conversations, or picked up through years of on-site intuition.
According to a Forbes Tech Council article, organizations that fail to capture this expertise risk losing not just skills, but the ability to troubleshoot, adapt, and innovate. The result is slower responses, longer downtimes, and more reliance on guesswork.
The cost of ‘we’ve always done it this way’
Younger technicians often start their careers with a steep learning curve. Without proper knowledge transfer, they may rely on outdated procedures, misinterpret legacy documents, or repeat past mistakes.
Inexperienced teams mean
- More errors during maintenance tasks
- Increased safety risks due to unclear protocols
- Slower onboarding and longer supervision periods
- Higher dependence on a shrinking group of “go-to” veterans
All of this adds pressure to maintenance teams and makes it harder to improve or innovate.
How digital twins can help preserve what matters
The good news is there’s a better way to protect and share institutional knowledge. It’s a solution that doesn’t rely on memory, paper, or tribal workflows.
CADMATIC eShare helps teams capture, contextualize, and preserve expertise by embedding it directly into the digital twin of the plant. It turns knowledge into a living, accessible asset.
Here’s how it works in practice:
- When an expert annotates a drawing or uploads a procedure, it’s linked to the actual equipment or system in the model.
- Lessons learned from past shutdowns or incidents can be stored alongside inspection data or process diagrams.
- Manuals and on-the-job tips can be added to specific components. This makes training easier and more intuitive.
Instead of starting from scratch, new team members explore a digital environment rich with insights put together by those who know the plant best.
From individual memory to shared knowledge
This isn’t about replacing people. It’s about amplifying their knowledge and making it accessible across time, shifts, and generations.
With CADMATIC eShare, that knowledge doesn’t disappear when someone leaves the company. It stays with the plant, embedded in the digital environment where it can support new technicians, inform decisions, and maintain consistency from one maintenance cycle to the next. The informal tricks and the hard-won insights can be captured and shared in context.
Best practices no longer live in someone’s head or get passed around as unwritten rules. They become part of how everyone works. Maintenance becomes more consistent, not because people are told to follow procedures, but because the right procedures are always visible, connected to the right components, and easy to understand.
And when your teams don’t have to rely on a few senior experts to troubleshoot or remember what was done last time, confidence grows. That’s the shift: from individual reliance to organizational resilience.
The best time to start capturing expertise is before it walks out the door. Industrial knowledge is hard-won and too valuable to lose. With the right tools, you can make sure it stays where it belongs: inside your operations, supporting every technician, planner, and engineer who comes next.
What’s even better, you can get started in days, rather than months. Sound to good to be true? It’s not. Let us show you how.
