As the skills gap widens and more employees retire, decades of experience and company investment is predicted to walk out the door. With nearly ten thousand people turning retirement age daily, manufacturers will need to look towards proactive solutions to capture tribal knowledge and transfer it to the incoming workforce.
Manufacturing Institute estimated that 2.4 million job openings in manufacturing—accounting for half of all open positions—will go unfilled between 2018 and 2028 as a direct consequence of the skills gap.
For those in the manufacturing and industrial sector, what’s commonly known as the skills gap is a well-documented issue. As a growing number of Americans retire, they take their decades of experience with them, resulting in a noticeable skills shortage.
Many manufacturers see reducing changeover time as a golden opportunity to improve operational efficiency and reduce waste. For good reason, a simple reduction in changeover time can increase output, reduce inventory/WIP, and improve responsiveness to customer demand.
Today we are happy to announce our collaboration with 3M, through an investment by 3M Ventures, to bring our standard work and work instruction training software to manufacturers of all sizes to help them achieve digital transformation goals.
When Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, was interviewed on NPR’s “How I Built This,” he revealed a valuable insight — sharing and improving knowledge is hard work.
Standard operating procedure (SOP) and work instruction templates help standardize processes and present information consistently. We’ve seen thousands of examples of these templates and the only consistency is their shortcomings.