FOCUS ON WORKFORCE pillar has been transformed by smart factory automation, IoT and advanced execution systems. Both have absorbed billions in investment and delivered real results.
The people pillar has not kept pace. The way most manufacturers transfer engineering knowledge into guidance for the workforce has not fundamentally changed. Products and processes have entered the modern era. The knowledge delivery to the people doing the work is stuck where it was twenty years ago.
That gap is not just an inconvenience. Every time that product complexity increases and the knowledge delivery method stays the same, the risk of errors goes up. Training takes longer. The cost of getting it wrong compounds. Engineering and automation are running on electricity. The people side of manufacturing is still“ working by candlelight”.
The first and last mile of the digital thread
The issue is not a lack of technology. It is a failure of translation. Engineering teams define products in sophisticated digital environments. However, by the time that information reaches the people performing the work, it has been manually converted into formats that lose context, clarity and interactivity.
I describe this as the first mile and last mile problem of the digital thread. The first mile is capturing knowledge from engineers and experienced workers and turning it into structured, reusable instructions. The last mile is delivering that knowledge to technicians and operators at the moment they need it and in a form on which they can immediately act.
Today, both ends depend upon manual effort that is slow, error-prone and disconnected from the systems that hold the underlying data. Engineers design a product in a sophisticated digital environment. Then someone must interpret that information and manually convert it into instructions, training materials and service documentation. That translation step is labour-intensive, requires constant coordination and starts over every time a design changes.
Inevitably, shortcuts get taken just to keep up. Steps are simplified. Visual detail is left out. Context is lost. And those shortcuts have real consequences on the execution side: ambiguous instructions lead to errors, rework,
quality escapes and longer training cycles. The effort compounds every time that product complexity increases or a design revision comes through.
In fabrication and assembly environments, this problem becomes especially visible. Every job that comes through the shop has something unique about it: a different material specification, a revised tolerance, a changed sequence, a new quality requirement etc. The critical information for this specific job might be buried on page 23 of a 40-page procedure that a veteran operator has seen a hundred times. What they really need is a summary of what is different and what is critical, not a verbose document which they will skim or skip entirely.
A crisis from both directions
The knowledge bottleneck would be serious enough on its own. What makes it urgent is a workforce shift tightening the constraint from both ends.
Experienced workers are retiring at a pace that outstrips hiring and when they leave, they take decades of practical wisdom that was never formally captured. It lived in their hands, their habits and their instincts for what could go wrong. The veteran who can detect a misalignment by feel, or knows exactly how a particular material will behave under load, carries knowledge that no engineering system recorded. Every retirement becomes a small institutional crisis, and most organisations do not realize the scale of the loss until it shows up in scrap rates, rework and warranty claims.
Meanwhile, the new generation entering manufacturing grew up surrounded by interactive, visual technology. They tap a screen and get answers. They watch videos.
They learn by doing. Then they arrive at work and are handed a binder or a spreadsheet filled with 57-character part numbers. The disconnect between what they expect and what they receive is a retention problem as much as it is a productivity problem. When the tools for doing the job feel like relics compared to every other part of their lives, it should not be surprising that turnover remains persistently high.
These forces compound. The veterans who could have trained the new generation are the ones leaving. New workers who need visual, interactive guidance are getting the same flat documents the veteran never needed because they already knew the job. The gap widens from both directions.
From connected worker to connected knowledge
The connected worker conversation has been dominated by hardware and connectivity. Companies ask which device to deploy, which platform to subscribe to and how to get data onto a screen in front of the worker. Those are valid questions, but they skip the more fundamental one: what knowledge does the worker really need and how should it be presented so that they can act on it with confidence?
You can hand someone the most advanced device available, but if the knowledge behind the work is still buried in disconnected databases or tribal memory, the worker is still left interpreting information rather than executing with clarity. The paper manual is the typewriter of manufacturing. A PDF on a tablet is the electric typewriter. It looks more modern, but the knowledge delivery method is the same.
The shift I advocate is moving from“ connected worker” to“ connected knowledge.” The difference is more than semantic. A connected worker strategy asks how to get data to a person. A connected knowledge strategy asks how to capture, structure and deliver actionable knowledge across the entire workforce and lifecycle and how to close the feedback loop so that the organisation gets smarter over time.
ISMR June 2026 | ismr. net | 25