Tribal Knowledge Is the Real Bottleneck in Print Automation

Every print business has someone who just knows. The prepress operator who knows a particular customer's files always need bleed adding. The estimator who knows which stock to quote up because it runs badly on press two. The finisher who knows which jobs will crack on the fold. None of it is written down, because it never needed to be while they were there.

Pat McGrew and Ryan McAbee argue in WhatTheyThink that this is the industry's real labour crisis. Hiring is hard, but the more serious damage happens every time an experienced operator, estimator or salesperson leaves and takes decades of undocumented knowledge with them. Their key point for anyone planning investment is that knowledge transfer is a prerequisite for every automation and AI project a print business has in mind.

We agree, and we see it in almost every workflow project we start.

You cannot automate a rule nobody has written down

Automation is, at heart, a set of decisions made in advance. A preflight profile decides what counts as an acceptable file. A workflow in Enfocus Switch decides where a job goes next. An imposition template decides how pages are laid out. Every one of those decisions has to come from somewhere, and in most print businesses it comes from the heads of a few people.

When we map a workflow, the documented process and the real process are rarely the same. The difference is usually tribal knowledge: the workarounds, exceptions and customer-specific habits that keep jobs moving. If those are not captured, the automated workflow either handles the easy jobs and leaves the hard ones to the same few people, or it gets the hard ones wrong.

Automation is also a way to keep knowledge

The good news is that the relationship works in both directions. Once a decision is built into a workflow, it no longer walks out of the door with a person. A well-built automated workflow is a form of documentation:

• A preflight profile records exactly what your business checks and fixes.
• A Switch flow records how jobs are routed and what happens to exceptions.
• Imposition and ganging rules record how your best operator lays out a sheet.
• MIS job templates record how your best estimator builds a quote.

The knowledge stops being a memory and becomes part of the system, versioned, tested and visible to anyone who needs it.

A practical way to capture it

This is the approach we use when knowledge capture is part of an automation project.

1. Find the single points of failure. List the tasks where only one person knows how, or where things go wrong when they are on holiday. Those are your priorities.
2. Watch, do not just ask. People rarely describe their own shortcuts accurately. Sit with them through a week of real jobs and note every decision and every exception.
3. Sort the decisions. Separate the rules (if this, then that) from the genuine judgement calls. Most of what looks like expertise turns out to be rules.
4. Automate the rules. Build them into preflight, routing, imposition and MIS templates, and test them against real files from the past.
5. Document the judgement. For decisions that should stay with a person, write down what they look at and why, and link it to the job ticket where it will be seen.
6. Review regularly. Customers, equipment and standards change. A rule nobody reviews becomes the next piece of hidden knowledge.

Why this matters before AI

AI tools are increasingly pitched as a way to fill skills gaps. In practice they learn from, and are configured with, the knowledge your business already has. If that knowledge is undocumented, the AI has nothing reliable to work from. We cover this in more detail in printing has the AI tools: is the workflow ready?

Capturing knowledge is not glamorous, but it protects the business against staff turnover, makes training faster, and gives every later investment, from automation to AI, a solid base to build on.

If you are worried about what would happen when a key person leaves, a free discovery call is a good place to start (here is what a workflow audit involves), or get in touch to talk it through.

Source: The Print Industry's Real Labor Crisis is Knowledge Lost by Pat McGrew and Ryan McAbee (WhatTheyThink).