ASSEMBLY Audible
The “Diet Coke Problem” as Manufacturers Face Experts Retiring
Manufacturers are facing a growing challenge as experienced workers retire and decades of plant-floor knowledge disappears with them.
On an upcoming episode of ASSEMBLY Audible, Aron Semle, CTO of HighByte, explains how much of that expertise exists outside formal documentation systems — often as practical workarounds and instinctive troubleshooting methods developed over years on the factory floor.
One example is what he calls the “Diet Coke problem.”
“If the machine starts to sound [one way]… you take Diet Coke and pour it into the bearings, into the gearbox, because what’s happening is the oil’s too viscous, and it kind of loosens the oil up, and the machine runs better,” Semle says.
According to Semle, those kinds of unconventional fixes represent tribal knowledge that is rarely captured before workers retire.
“The thing you need to do is just get people to start to write that down,” he says.
Semle believes AI systems could eventually help manufacturers preserve and distribute that expertise more effectively by allowing operators to ask questions directly and receive contextual guidance in real time.
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“It’s embedding that tribal knowledge into a model that anyone on the floor can leverage,” he says.
Semle expands on this in the full episode, including how manufacturers are using AI and standardized industrial data models to preserve operational knowledge and support the next generation of workers. The full episode drops July 2.
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