Knowledge loss at shift handover: when the gaps only show up later

I went through this myself when I took over maintenance on a plant some time ago. What needed doing was clear. Where the material for it was, not at all.

A few items were listed as “done”. Look closer and they were not. And the material for the actual work was not sitting sorted in a store room. It had already been unpacked and spread across the whole plant, some of it badly labelled, some of it simply not where the plan said it should be.

So my first days were not spent on maintenance. They were spent searching.

The more often I talked about it, the clearer it got: this does not only happen to me. It happens everywhere one person takes something over from another. At shift change, when a plant is handed over, when a project changes hands, or simply when a task moves on in the normal working day.

The knowledge about where things are and what the real status is usually sits in the heads of the people who were there before. Once they are gone, it is either gone with them or it has to be pieced back together the hard way.

That the follow-up to a maintenance job is not an optional extra is also how the German safety rulebook sees it. DGUV Information 209-015, published by the German Social Accident Insurance, splits maintenance into planning, execution and follow-up: three parts of equal weight. In practice, the follow-up is still the first thing dropped when time runs short.

The obvious reaction is almost always the same: the form that already exists gets longer. There is more to fill in.

The problem is that at the end of it you still do not know what you should have asked about in the first place. You only notice afterwards that something was missing. I have seen exactly this in handover after handover, different examples every time, the same pattern.

The observation is not new. A joint working group of GfWM and DGQ, the German knowledge management and quality management associations, notes that knowledge management in companies is often reduced to IT and documentation. How new knowledge is created, passed on and kept current tends to go unanswered. DIN EN ISO 9001:2015 asks for something different in clause 7.1.6: an organization has to determine the knowledge its processes need, maintain it and make it available. Available, not filed away.

hAiner is not another folder and not another form. It is a knowledge network that pays attention. Where important information appears to be missing, hAiner asks about it instead of waiting for someone to happen to look for it. And anyone who wants to pass on what they know does not have to wait for the next handover: a memo is enough, at any time, even when nothing is due.

In practice that means hAiner knows the documents and information that have already been fed in. When a shift report or a site diary is filled in, hAiner checks the entry against them and asks targeted follow-up questions where something does not add up or is simply missing, before the entry counts as closed.

Over time this produces a shift report the next person can genuinely rely on, rather than a list of gaps that only surfaces when it matters.

Where a fixed process for such reports or handovers already exists, hAiner works inside it. Instead of imposing a new scheme from outside, hAiner adapts to the way things are already done. If something is missing within that process, hAiner asks structured follow-up questions until the required information is actually there.

For me the real point is not the technology behind it, but what it does. Every hour someone spends searching is an hour in which no work gets done. That costs money. Money you can save if the knowledge is where it is needed from the start.

There is more on the subject on our overview page on preserving experiential knowledge. And if you want to know which handovers in your operation are losing knowledge, our knowledge loss check gives you a first indication in a few minutes.