IPC International Community magazine an association member publication
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102 I-CONNECT007 MAGAZINE I OCTOBER 2026 A RT I C L E Every shop has knowledge that lives in only one person's head, and then you find out just how much when that person takes a vacation or leaves the company. The line starts acting up, the yield slips, and everyone realizes that they should have captured that person's knowledge. The cost is not limited to the parts that must be reworked or scrapped. Production slows down as people try to replicate the decisions the experienced operator made without much thought. Supervisors start calling around for answers, engineering gets pulled into the line, and the new operator becomes afraid to touch anything without asking permis- sion. One missing person can quickly turn into five people losing time. It's not like you didn't already know this. So, to prevent this situation, you try handing the veteran plater a work-instruction template to fill out. A few weeks later, the template comes back half-completed, or it contains the same basic steps already posted beside the line: check the temperature, verify the chemistry, start the cycle, record the readings. All are correct, but none of them capture the experiential knowledge base that makes that plater so valuable. Yet, this has been the standard half-hearted and wholly ineffective attempt to do just that. So, why doesn't the template approach work? The problem is that most templates are built to docu- ment a process after the important decisions have already been made. They are good at holding limits, Turn Your AI Into Action: Interview Your Plater BY S E A N PAT T E RS O N , C RO S S G E N A I