Comment by rlpb
10 days ago
> If you replaced every worker with someone else of equal skill of course manufacturing company would continue to operate.
No it wouldn't, because a senior worker wouldn't be around to say things like "oh yes we use a jig under this circumstance that we keep over here <points>". Every business has ton of institutional knowledge like that.
It turns out, that isn't worth much. Because they upended the factories and sent them to Mexico and China overnight without a person to point and say where the jig was. Seemingly, they figured it out.
To be clear, I'm not actually disagreeing with your point, I do think it's important to have those people. But companies felt otherwise.
At least in the instances I've been aware of, they usually weren't really "overnight". Usually a good bit of knowledge transfer or actually moving institutional people, sometimes having the other factory coming online in parallel so they can tweak processes, etc. Usually a years-long process. I think few truly overnight shut down one factory and opened the other with those other people having zero knowledge or training on specific processes without experiencing big issues.