The Process That Was Never Written Down

Early in our career, we took night classes in supply chain, several of them taught by working professionals inside their own plants. One class was held at a factory that built industrial gas turbine engines. The instructor told us about the day the whole place ground to a halt — not one finished engine would fire during testing. Not one.

For two weeks, the team tore into everything: materials, components, assembly, test procedures. Nothing explained it. Then they traced it back to one man who had just retired.

This was back when factory floors still allowed chewing tobacco. All shift, every shift, for decades, this employee had spit into a chemical vat used to plate critical engine components. It sounds absurd, but the trace chemical interaction had altered the plating solution’s chemistry just enough to make the engines work. When he retired, the process retired with him.

The company had specs, procedures, and experienced engineers. What it didn’t have was any real understanding of why its own process worked. That’s tribal knowledge — the business getting the right result for reasons nobody understands, until the person, the workaround, or the accidental variable walks out the door and the whole thing falls apart.

Before automating anything in a business system, make sure you understand the process you’re actually running — not the one written in the binder. It’s worth asking: what part of your operation works today only because one person knows the secret?

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Lee Stout