By the team at CADDi. CADDi won the ‘Best SaaS Product for Business Intelligence or Analytics‘ and ‘Best SaaS Product for Engineering Management, PLM or CAD‘ categories, and were finalists in the ‘Best Data-driven SaaS Product‘ and ‘Best SaaS Product for Supply Chain or Warehouse Management‘ categories, at The 2024 SaaS Awards.

When you think of retirement, you’re picturing lazy mornings, new hobbies, and R&R – the word “crisis” probably doesn’t come to mind.

But for those left after a wave of retirement, “hair-on-fire”-priority challenges start piling up immediately. Workplaces across America are facing an absolute tsunami of retirement soon, especially in manufacturing and other traditional industries. Projections show 2.1 million manufacturing jobs going unfilled by 2030 as many roles are held by those over 55. Outside of manufacturing, election uncertainties and economic restabilizing will lead to many career migrations. Wherever you look, people are leaving jobs, and those that remain are scrambling to fill the gaps.

While all companies will have to weather storms of departing knowledge and expertise, you don’t need to resign yourself to a major loss of productivity. A new era of software solutions is here, where not just information, but real insights and expertise, can be conveyed to even the most junior employees. Let’s take a look at why this new technology is necessary, and how you can conquer the brain drain in manufacturing.

Mitigating the Brain Drain of Expert Employees

What makes these retirement crises so impactful is that it isn’t just any employees that are leaving. It’s often the most veteran, experienced, and knowledgeable employees that you’re left needing to replace. That’s tough! No matter how skilled a hire is, your unique setup and the years of history of your past decisions are things that require experience with that specific role at that specific company. And when all that experience walks out the door, what do you do?

You can try to mitigate this through policy: mandate time for veteran employees to pass down what they’ve learned to newer employees and document their processes. This is a great best practice, and it’s necessary to build continuity in working relationships and culture. But it isn’t sufficient. No matter how exhaustive you try to be, some gaps of knowledge will always remain. And moreover, if your most expert employees are spending all their time teaching, you’ll take a big hit on productivity until everyone’s up to speed.

The real answer is mitigating this brain drain through technology. You may think, “okay, great! We’ve got a technological solution in place already. We’ve got searchable databases for everything, and all sorts of automation in our process.” Once again, you’ll need more: this technological foundation is necessary, but not sufficient. You need standalone data points that are meaningful. There’s a big difference between technology that just provides information, and technology that provides insights that grow alongside your data.

Technology That Enables Insights

It’s worth diving into this distinction between information and insights: not only is it key to closing the wisdom gaps created by retirements, but it represents one of the biggest sea changes in how software solutions are designed in the modern era. We’ll use CADDi as an example. Our innovative solution allows you to parse and search for everything in technical drawings, from their labels and metadata, to notes (even handwritten!) on the drawing, to the size, shape, and proportions of the parts themselves.

It’s pretty cool! And you might think, wow, that’ll save some time. And true, it saves hours and hours, but it provides something perhaps even more important: useful strategic insights. By linking together PDM data for all your designs, PLM data for everything you’re working with now, and your entire procurement history from ERP data, you create a one-stop shop for any data needed to inform future designs or purchases. And what’s critical is that all this data is linked by the part’s design. You don’t need to know specific part IDs or tags, you just need a general idea of what it should look like (even a hand drawn sketch!) and you can start investigating.

The problem with most database software is that if someone inexperienced opens them, all they’re going to see is lots of numbers and labels, which can only be navigated using numbers and labels. This creates a lot of friction when the task they’re trying to complete is typically motivated by a drawing: designing, procuring, or building a quote for a part that meets certain specifications.

If a new employee is asked for a bearing of a certain size with a certain width of flange and a certain finish, how does that translate into numbers and labels in a database search? The answer is: poorly. Even if you manage to account for every desired specification, have consistent labeling for every feature, and carry this information across all of your systems (a tall order when dealing with tens of thousands of drawings!), learning that encoding takes ages for new employees. It takes even longer when the employees that knew it like the back of their hand have left.

A New Era of Insightful Software

What this new era of insightful software can do is remove the dependency on codified language to make connections. In manufacturing, it means allowing you to find every part you’ve worked with in the past that looks similar to the bearing you need, alongside all the material data, QA history, and prices: everything a new employee needs to get a bearing that fits their needs at the best possible price.

In software development, it’s code-parsing tools that let new engineers ask natural-language questions to find specific areas of a codebase without needing to crawl through line-by-line or rely on comments. It’s creatives finding the ideal images by searching for what the image is of, instead of what keywords and tags have been manually added to it. It’s doctors working alongside software that can scan medical images and highlight areas requiring further study.

In all these cases and more, software formerly gave you only abstractions: records in a database that could be searched or sorted, but were always a step away from the actual object in the spotlight. This new era lets you work directly from the object itself, searching with the qualities of the object you require or want to iterate on. Rather than needing years of experience to synthesize information into real insights, this software brings you directly to the answers you’re seeking – or insights that you didn’t even think to ask for. The new era of software can synthesize knowledge beyond your typical patterns.

We love human intelligence and expertise. It’s a key ingredient in any successful business. But humans leave, and we shouldn’t let their intelligence leave with them. Insightful software like CADDi lets the work your veteran employees completed live on as meaningful direction and wisdom for new employees, leaving them equipped to make strategic decisions as effectively as your retired experts.