Facilities often rely on a few experienced staff members (or even just one) to navigate their piping systems and keep operations running. They know where the right valve is and what it does. They remember past incidents. They’re the ones you call when an emergency needs to be handled. But what happens when that person retires or resigns? Does your facility have the knowledge you need documented and shared across teams?
Knowledge at Risk
For healthcare and industrial facilities, losing the go-to team member and a working knowledge of piping infrastructure can lead to longer shutdowns, delayed emergency response, increased maintenance costs, and greater risk to system safety and reliability. And this problem will only grow larger over time.
By 2030, 30 million Americans will have reached retirement age, with 2.1 million in healthcare and 1.8 million in manufacturing planning to retire before then. Yet, 92% of organizations do not consistently capture knowledge from employees nearing retirement. With younger generations averaging just 4.1 years of organizational tenure, the risk of losing critical knowledge extends beyond retirement.
Get It Before It’s Gone
With more retirements and higher turnover, what can your facility do to preserve legacy knowledge and maintain continuity of operations?
Identify Knowledge Gaps & Key Personnel
You might have well-documented policies and procedures for how staff should respond in an emergency, review systems to plan for renovations, or conduct preventive maintenance. But what happens when it comes time to apply those guidelines? Both the application of knowledge and the knowledge that can only be gained from personal experience need to be recorded and passed down by tenured staff members.
Who are the experienced technicians who possess information about your piping systems that isn’t documented? This might include specialized expertise, lessons learned from past incidents, troubleshooting best practices, and emergency response execution.
Conduct Interviews
Once you’ve identified the staff members with the knowledge you need to document, schedule interviews with them. Prepare a list of questions to record detailed information about system configuration and navigation, valve types, maintenance procedures, and emergency response.
If possible, record audio or video of these conversations to make the knowledge easier to document later. Ask technicians to identify things like hard-to-locate valves, undocumented system modifications, and recurring issues that may not appear in existing records.
Synthesize and consolidate this information about maintenance procedures and schedules, as well as any historical issues related to the facility’s piping systems and valves. Maybe this means changes to existing SOPs or the development of new ones. Regardless of how you decide to record and present the information, make sure it’s clear and accessible to all relevant employees.
Follow Through with Training
Develop training materials based on your new documentation and guidelines to support onboarding of new technicians. When possible and when retirement timelines allow, pair experts with their successors for mentorship and shadowing to facilitate hands-on experience and real-time knowledge transfer. Also consider having experts cross-train members of different departments to support facility-wide knowledge of piping systems.
Training is an ongoing effort. Whether you’re hiring new technicians to round out your staff or training those with less tenure, standardized documentation and training materials will support consistent coverage of piping system operations.
Stay Organized
Once you have current information from your most experienced technicians, don’t put that knowledge at risk again! Keep the captured information organized into a single knowledge base for easy access across the organization. Include information on pipe materials, diameters, routing, and connections; all backflow prevention methods, devices, and assemblies; and all valves in the facility, including their type, size, function, and features. Many facilities use digital mapping tools and as-built piping schematics to support accessibility and retrieval and simplify updates.
Maintaining Knowledge & Planning Ahead
Piping infrastructure is not static. Don’t wait until your experts have retired or resigned: Plan to gather information early and often. Implement a system for regular updates and make knowledge capture part of the offboarding process for all employees. Update documentation whenever piping systems are modified, maintenance procedures change, or new equipment is installed.
Need support documenting your facility’s piping systems? HydroCorp’s team of experts can help with on-site surveys, corrective action recommendations, and piping schematic development.
