Preserving Institutional Knowledge | Part 2: How to Capture It Before It Walks Out the Door

In Part 1 of our three-part series with Amy Bonner, VP of PRINTING AI, PRINTING United Alliance, we explored what print businesses risk losing when experienced employees retire, change roles, or leave the company.

Recognizing the risk is step one. The next challenge is figuring out how to actually capture that institutional knowledge before it heads out the door for good. In Part 2 of Preserving Institutional Knowledge, Bonner shares the mistakes print businesses should avoid, how to identify the knowledge that matters most, and practical ways to capture it.

Amy Servi-Bonner, VP of PRINTING AI, PRINTING United Alliance

What are the most common mistakes companies make when they try to preserve institutional knowledge?

There are three, and they're all the same mistake wearing different clothes. First, treating it as a documentation project. Someone gets asked to "write an SOP" before they retire, and what comes out is a checklist that misses the judgment entirely because the person doesn't know how to articulate 20 years of pattern recognition on a blank page. It has to be pulled out through structured conversation, not assigned as homework.

Second, waiting for the retirement announcement to start. By then you're in stage two of that three-stage window, and you've already lost your best option.

Third, trying to capture everything at once instead of starting with the one or two roles that would actually hurt. Most operations have never done the exercise of asking, if this person announced their retirement on Friday, what would Monday actually look like. Two or three roles light up immediately when you ask that question honestly. Start there.

If a company is starting from scratch, what are the first steps you recommend?

Start with the exercise, not the technology. Ask who the most valuable person on your floor is right now, meaning the person who, if they called on a Monday morning and said they were done, would make your stomach drop. Do that across your key roles: senior estimator, lead press operator, color specialist, production scheduler, customer service lead. Wherever a name comes to mind fast, that's your knowledge risk.

Then run a structured knowledge audit on the highest-risk one or two roles first. Not a survey. A real elicitation session with someone who knows how to ask the questions that surface exception logic and decision frameworks, the things that never make it into a manual because nobody ever had to explain them out loud before. That gives you a clear picture of what's at risk before you build anything, and that picture is valuable on its own, even before an AI tool ever enters the conversation.

What does effective knowledge capture actually look like in practice?

It's a structured conversation, not a documentation exercise, and it's harder to do well than people expect. Asking someone to write down what they do gets you a checklist. What you actually need is a guided elicitation that surfaces judgment the person doesn't even realize they're using, because after 20 years it just feels like instinct to them, not a decision. Getting past the instinct to the actual decision framework underneath it is a skill, not a form, and it's usually where people who try this themselves get stuck. They ask what someone does and get a surface-level answer.

Done well, it produces a structured knowledge asset, decision frameworks, exception logic, diagnostic sequences, the pattern recognition that took years to build, captured as a living system rather than a static PDF nobody opens again. And it has to be tested. You know it works when a newer employee can use it to make the same call the expert would have made, not just recite the steps.

Knowledge capture is only part of the equation. In Part 3, Bonner explains how print businesses can turn that captured expertise into a resource employees can actually access, use, and build on.

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.