Why Maintenance Knowledge is Essential to the Success of Industrial Companies

American manufacturing is in the middle of an unprecedented investment boom, with over $236 billion spent on new facilities since 2021, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

But while the industrial world focuses on growth, it faces a labor shortage that threatens these investments, especially when it comes to maintaining production-critical assets.

Industrial maintenance is one of the hardest-to-fill roles in U.S. manufacturing with the BLS projecting 54,200 openings annually through 2034 and employment growth 4x the national average. This isn’t a future problem either—70% of maintenance teams have been short-staffed in the last 12 months and 37% are chronically understaffed (often or almost always short-staffed), according to our survey of over 200 maintenance leaders.

This has some immediate consequences to these labor gaps, like increased unplanned downtime and rising costs from an overreliance on contractors and overtime. These challenges are only going to get worse and much of that is due to one factor: A catastrophic loss of maintenance knowledge.

This article explores why retaining maintenance knowledge is so important to overcoming the skilled labor shortage, why it’s disappearing so quickly, and how to prevent this from happening at your organization.

Why maintenance knowledge is quickly going extinct and what it’s costing industrial companies

Why is maintenance knowledge disappearing so quickly?

Maintenance technicians spend thousands of hours interacting with machines, building an encyclopedic knowledge of every inch of that equipment. Since this knowledge has often lived exclusively in the heads of these technicians, it has always been at risk. But the loss of these lessons has been significant over the last decade, and there’s no sign that this downward trend will end any time soon.

So, why has knowledge loss accelerated so quickly in recent years? Here are some takeaways from our survey over 211 maintenance leaders:

• Frontline staff are leaving in huge numbers: 33% of maintenance teams said that they’re experiencing higher than average retirements, turnover, or both. Quite simply, the people with the knowledge are leaving their jobs more frequently than ever.

• New people aren’t entering the field: 55% of maintenance teams said that their primary staffing challenge was a lack of qualified candidates to hire. The pipeline of skilled maintenance technicians is shrinking, so there’s no one to hand knowledge to.

• Teams don’t have formal processes for capturing knowledge: 75% of teams are still in the early stages of digitizing maintenance knowledge. Information is locked in the wrong places, like the heads of technicians, outdated spreadsheets, or scraps of paper.

• Knowledge transfer is mostly informal: 72% of maintenance teams have either no formal onboarding or knowledge transfer program, or a mostly informal structure. This is putting new hires behind from day-one.

• Labor gaps are making it harder to digitize: More than 65% of chronically understaffed maintenance teams say digitization is a top priority. But being short staffed is creating a drag on this goal. Chronically understaffed teams are 46% more likely to report that labor gaps are slowing their ability to adopt technology that could help them capture maintenance knowledge.

Why is maintenance knowledge so important to the success of industrial companies?

If you ask a veteran technician about a piece of equipment, they’ll tell you what every weird noise means, the slight adjustment that makes it run right, and why it needs to start at half-speed in the winter. If that technician leaves, it can take years to regain that knowledge. In the meantime, that weird noise can turn into hundreds of hours of downtime and cold weather can send throughput plummeting.

In maintenance, the impact of knowledge loss can be measured in lost production and late deliveries. Industrial companies are suffering these consequences on a massive scale due to staffing gaps. For example:

• 46% of chronically understaffed maintenance teams say unplanned downtime is increasing

• 48% of facilities are spending more on contractors to fill staffing gaps

• 43% of teams are doing more overtime, leading to higher maintenance costs and turnover rates

These financial consequences can be directly tied to knowledge gaps and poor knowledge capture processes. For example, teams without a fully centralized knowledge base are less likely to be cross-training employees, and teams not cross-training are 34% more likely to experience higher downtime as a result of understaffing.

The problem compounds when teams grow. You can capture knowledge and build great SOPs, but if they're scattered across systems or difficult to find, they won’t be used. The value comes from finding the right information at the right time.

How to improve the way you manage maintenance knowledge

There are two critical components of getting value from maintenance knowledge: Capturing it and making it accessible.

How to capture and digitize more maintenance knowledge 

Capturing team knowledge is an everyday habit that’s not always easy to begin. Everyone on your team is maxed out with their regular to-do lists, never mind adding an entirely new project to the mix. Fortunately, there’s a middle ground. 

Knowledge capture requires consistency and structure, but that can mean you spend the first 15 minutes of every day improving a single point of a single process. The goal is to build a repeatable system that leads to progress, no matter how small. Here’s what this can look like in practice using a weekly routine:

• Day 1: Choose an upcoming work order with an undocumented or incomplete procedure.

• Day 2: Have a technician record a voice note as they complete the work order. It can be stream of consciousness and imperfect — the goal is to capture a realistic baseline from an experienced tech.

• Day 3: Transcribe the voice note using an AI platform. You can skip this step if your maintenance software has voice-to-text features.

• Day 4: Use AI to turn the transcript into a procedure. Some maintenance software have this capability, which is best for keeping everything in one place and skipping the extra step of adding to a shared system.

• Day 5: Review the procedure with the technician, revising where necessary. When complete, add the procedure to a central location, like your CMMS or a shared digital folder.

How to make maintenance knowledge more accessible and actionable

Teams that focus on knowledge accessibility are less likely to feel the effects of the skilled labor shortage. In fact, teams that had fully transitioned team knowledge into a digital system were 4x more likely to have been rarely or never understaffed in the last 12 months.

Making information accessible requires three things: a single place where knowledge lives, a standard format that makes it easy to find and use, and a habit of keeping it current. Most teams already have the tools, they just haven't connected them into a system. Here’s what this can look like in practice at your organization:

• Run a search test: Pick your most critical asset and five common PMs or failure modes. Ask a technician to find the procedure for each one on their own. Wherever they get stuck is your accessibility gap.

• Put information at the point of work: One way to do this is to add QR codes to high-priority assets that link directly to relevant procedures in your CMMS. Focus on reducing the number of clicks or steps needed to find information.

• Create a system for flagging quick fixes: Every time a technician finds something wrong or confusing with a procedure, have them flag it with a standard pass/fail field in a work order. Review and update all flagged procedures weekly.

• Put a bounty on information living outside your central system: If getting all your data in one place is proving to be a challenge, or if you want to accelerate the process, consider offering an incentive for frontline staff to find and flag information living in their head, old binders, or an outdated drive.

What’s next: Winning teams will maintain knowledge like equipment

Teams that emerge successful from the skilled labor shortage will be the ones that maintain knowledge the same way they maintain equipment. They’ll expand the maintenance mindset to protect not only machines, but knowledge as well. Treat knowledge like an asset and build habits that let your team capture, access, retain, and transfer knowledge. The skilled labor shortage is real, and it isn't going away. But the gap between teams that adapt and teams that don't might just be based on how you handle maintenance knowledge in the next couple of years.