Documentation Debt: When Process Knowledge Lives in Operator Heads

The process wasn’t documented. It was being spit into the vat.

Early in my career I took night classes in supply chain. A lot of them were taught by working professionals, right inside their own plants.

One class was at a factory that built industrial gas turbine engines. The instructor told us about the day the whole place ground to a halt.

Not one finished engine would fire during testing. Not one.

For two weeks they tore into everything. Materials. Components. Assembly. Test procedures. Nothing.

Then they traced it back to one guy who had just retired.

This was back when you could chew tobacco on the factory floor. All shift, every shift, this guy spit into a chemical vat used to plate critical engine components.

Gross? Absolutely. But his spit had altered the chemistry of that plating solution just enough to make the engines work.

When he retired, the process retired with him.

Think about that. The company had specs. Procedures. Experienced engineers. What it didn’t have was any real understanding of why its own process worked.

That’s tribal knowledge. Sometimes the business gets the right result for reasons nobody understands — and when the person, the workaround, or the accidental variable walks out the door, the whole thing falls apart.

Before you automate anything in a business system, make sure you understand the process you’re actually running. Not the one written in the binder.

So here’s my question: what part of your operation works today only because one person knows the secret?

Staudt Advisory