When Experience Retires – How We at EppsteinFOILS Are Preserving Decades of Knowledge

Why we use Artificial Intelligence to safeguard the most valuable asset in our production: the hands-on expertise of our people.

There are people in our plant who can hear when something is off with a rolling mill. No sensor has flagged it, no display is flashing red – but the colleague turns around and says: "Something's not right." And he's correct. Every single time.

This kind of knowledge isn't written in any manual. It's not in any data sheet or machine file. It lives in the heads of specialists who have been working at EppsteinFOILS for ten, twenty or thirty years and who know our equipment better than any operating manual could ever describe. And this is precisely the knowledge that is at risk – not from competition or technology, but simply from the passage of time. When experienced colleagues retire, their knowledge goes with them. Irretrievably. Unless you do something about it.

The Problem Nobody Likes to Talk About

In industry, we talk a lot about digitalisation, Industry 4.0, automation. What comes up surprisingly rarely: the silent loss of knowledge that takes place in almost every manufacturing company. Every day, with every retirement, with every resignation. It's a bit like running a library where the most valuable books aren't on the shelves but in the librarian's memory. When the librarian leaves, the library is still there – but it's suddenly worth a lot less.

For us at EppsteinFOILS, this issue is particularly pressing. And there's a simple reason: we build our production equipment largely ourselves. The machines on which we roll, cut and laminate metal foils are not off-the-shelf products from a catalogue. They are in-house developments, built for our specific requirements and our specific products – such as separator foils for defibrillators or sealing foils for wine screw caps. There's no hotline to call when a machine plays up. There's only our own people.

Experiential Knowledge Is Not a Luxury – It's a Competitive Advantage

We hold a unique market position in several of our business areas. That position rests not only on the quality of our foils but, to a very large extent, on the know-how behind their manufacture. We want and need to protect this knowledge – while at the same time ensuring that it doesn't disappear along with the people who built it up.

That sounds like a given. But it isn't. In the reality of many mid-sized companies, this is exactly what happens: the experienced machine operator leaves, the successor starts from scratch, and the organisation needs months or years to get back to the same level. In the worst case, it never does, because certain tricks and knacks were simply never documented anywhere.

Our Answer: AI-Powered Knowledge Management

That's why we have launched a project that tackles precisely this challenge. In collaboration with the Taunus-based startup great2know, we are using a software platform for digital knowledge management built on Artificial Intelligence.

Here's how it works: in moderated interviews, our plant, process and materials specialists talk about their experiences. Freely, personally. This isn't about dry process descriptions – it's about lived knowledge: which adjustment do you make first when the material shows waviness after rolling? How do you recognise that an adhesive system in a laminated composite is reaching its limits? What do you do when a machine doesn't run smoothly straight after maintenance? We have even brought in former colleagues who have already retired – because their knowledge is far too valuable to simply let go.

The great2know software then processes these loosely spoken inputs and presents them in a structured, interconnected format. The AI ensures that the knowledge doesn't vanish into an unsorted data graveyard but is linked with the right contexts and remains searchable – including for colleagues who may not join us for another five years.

What AI Can Do – and What It Cannot

An important clarification that matters to us: the AI does not replace a single member of our team. Nor does it replace their judgement, their experience or their intuition. What it can do is something different: it helps to find the structure within the knowledge. It identifies connections that a person might not see at first glance because they came up in different conversations with different people. It makes knowledge searchable, navigable and therefore usable.

The goal is not to file information away in a database. It is to prepare the experiential logic that has been built up over decades in such a way that future teams can benefit from it too. The AI handles the structuring – the actual expertise remains with the people who contribute it.

A Beginning – with Great Potential

We are at the start of this project. The first interviews are under way, the first building blocks of knowledge are being digitally captured and prepared. If the approach proves successful – and we are confident it will – we intend to extend it to further areas of the business, such as financial management or quality assurance.

For us as a company with over 170 years of history, this is an exciting moment: tradition and Artificial Intelligence are not mutually exclusive. Quite the opposite. In this case, AI is the tool that ensures tradition is not lost. That the knowledge of the people who made EppsteinFOILS what it is today will still be available tomorrow. For the next generation of foil makers.

And for the colleague currently standing at the rolling mill, wondering why it sounds a little different than usual – soon, he won't be the only one who knows the answer.