Preserving Institutional Knowledge | Part 1: What Print Businesses Are Losing

In a three-part series with Amy Bonner, VP of PRINTING AI, PRINTING United Alliance, we dig into the importance of preserving institutional knowledge. As experienced employees retire, change roles, or leave a company, print businesses have to grapple with knowledge transfer, and in many cases, they don't realize what expertise is at risk until it's already walking out the door.

By taking the right approach and using the right tools and resources, print businesses can begin organizing, preserving, and sharing key knowledge with current and future employees. In Part 1 of Preserving Institutional Knowledge, Bonner shares what print organizations risk losing if they don't act.

Amy Bonner, VP of PRINTING AI, PRINTING United Alliance

What types of institutional or tribal knowledge are most commonly lost in print businesses when experienced employees leave?

Five things, and none of them live in a manual. Substrate intuition. The operator who knows a certain paper will give you head strikes on an inkjet press above 60% humidity, not because a spec sheet told them, but because they lived through the mistake once and never forgot it. Color management judgment. When to trust the ICC profile and when to override it because a specific client's brand manager has a preference that lives nowhere in the job spec. Production exception logic. The diagnostic sequence that takes a problem from two hours to 20 minutes because somebody learned it the hard way five years ago and never wrote it down. Customer and job history. Which clients underestimate quantities, which account managers' files always come in missing bleed. And vendor instincts. Who to call at seven in the morning when the primary substrate is on backorder and you need an answer before the press starts.

None of it is in the ERP. None of it is in the SOPs. It is in people, and it is walking out the door on a schedule most operations aren't tracking.

Why is preserving that knowledge becoming a bigger issue for the industry today?

Two curves are crossing at the same time. The average commercial inkjet operator in the United States is 48 years old, which means your most experienced press people are, on average, 17 years from retirement, and some are already past it. At the same time, 95% of end users say they can't find skilled operators and technicians, and nearly 60% expect that to get worse, not better. So the knowledge is aging out at the exact moment the labor market makes it hardest to replace.

AI adds a second pressure, and it's the one nobody expects. The moment you put AI into estimating or scheduling or customer communication, it forces you to write down decisions your best people used to make silently in their heads. You can't govern a decision you never had to name before. That's not a knowledge problem anymore. It's a survival decision.

What are the biggest business risks when that knowledge isn't captured or shared, and when do companies typically realize they've waited too long?

The direct cost is one to two times annual salary to replace a high-tenure professional, once you count recruitment, onboarding, and the mistakes a new hire makes learning what the last person already knew. That's $80,000 to $200,000 per exit, and most operations book it as a recruiting line item instead of what it actually is, a knowledge loss.

There are three stages, and only one gives you real options. Before the announcement, you have full access to the person and time to do the capture right. That's where you want to be. After the announcement, you have weeks, not months; the person is already checked out mentally, and the capture is rushed and incomplete. After they leave, the window is closed. Whatever wasn't captured is gone, and you're paying to reconstruct it through trial, error, and mistakes your team lives through in real time. I've sat across the table from enough operations in that third stage to tell you: Nobody in it wished they'd waited longer to start.

Preserving institutional knowledge starts with recognizing what’s at risk. In Part 2, Bonner explores how print businesses can begin capturing critical expertise before it walks out the door.

Explore more insights and resources from PRINTING AI to learn how AI can help print businesses capture expertise, strengthen their workforce, and prepare for what’s next.