Recently, I spoke with Dave Griffith about just how quickly we are losing subject matter experts in manufacturing. I think this could be a real issue for manufacturing in the next 5 to 10 years and despite all of the technological advances we have made, we still rely on people for our plants to run well. See the discussions below. The full video is first, and some snippets from that video are below that if you only want to watch a few minutes.
It is getting harder to retain engineers:
Operators or subject matter experts, who is running things correctly?
How do we capture SME knowledge?
Knowing what questions to ask and how to put the answers into simple concepts is definitely an art in itself.