Every manufacturing business I’ve visited has a Gary. (He might not actually be called Gary, of course, but everyone knows who he is!)
He’s been with the company for twenty-five years. Sometimes longer. He helped build the first generation of the product and remembers every major design change since. He knows which engineering updates solved recurring problems and which ones accidentally created new ones. He’s worked on machines that haven’t been built for years, knows exactly which pages in the service manual can’t be trusted, and has a collection of little tricks that never made it into any documentation because they were learned the hard way.
Gary is one of those people you simply can’t replace overnight, but the trouble is, most businesses don’t realise they’ve built their entire service operation around him!
“Gary, have you seen this fault before?”
“Gary, which part do I need?”
“Gary, is this the right procedure?”
“Gary, can you just come and have a look?”
Of course none of those questions are unreasonable, but most are coming from qualified technicians who are perfectly capable of doing the work. They just haven’t worked on that particular product for a while, or they’re dealing with a product variant they haven’t seen before, or the documentation is out of date, or perhaps there are five different revisions of the same assembly and they’re understandably reluctant to make the wrong call.
So they do what anyone would do - ask Gary!
Gary becomes the company’s internal search engine with every answer living in his head - and a red flag for the business.
Businesses often talk about skills shortages, but this isn’t always about a lack of skilled people. Instead, it’s usually more about a lack of accessible product knowledge - and there’s a big difference.
The technicians asking Gary aren’t inexperienced. They’ve completed training, gained qualifications and know how to work safely. What they often lack however is confidence in a specific situation because the last time they repaired that product might have been eighteen months ago. It’s difficult to remember every procedure, every product revision and every engineering update when you’re supporting hundreds of assets across an installed base.
Traditional training doesn’t really solve that problem either.
Sending technicians away for a week of classroom training has its place, particularly for new products or complex equipment. But knowledge fades surprisingly quickly if it isn’t used. By the time someone needs to carry out that repair again, they’re often back where they started, looking for reassurance that they’re doing the right thing.
Which usually means finding Gary.
The reality is that most organisations don’t measure how much time this is actually consuming, because rarely have I seen in manufacturing businesses a person that actually wants to own the issue of non-active repair time.
They measure active repair times, first-time fix rates, parts usage and productivity, but what no-one is accountable for are the hundreds of small interruptions that happen every week.
Every phone call. Every walk across the workshop. Every photograph sent over Whatsapp. Every “have you got five minutes?”
Those five minutes quickly become hours.
Meanwhile, Gary isn’t working on the jobs that genuinely need his experience. He’s answering questions that could have been answered another way if the knowledge had been captured and made available at the point of work.
There’s another risk, or hidden cost, that receives surprisingly little attention: What happens when Gary retires?
Businesses usually think about replacing the person, but what OEMs should really be thinking about is how to preserve the tribal knowledge.
Not just the formal procedures, but to capture the practical experience, the judgement and the lessons learned after years of servicing real equipment in real customer environments.
Those are often the things that make the difference between a repair taking thirty minutes or three hours, but once that knowledge walks out of the door, rebuilding it can take years or create reactive issues that could have been resolved earlier.
The organisations making the biggest improvements aren’t expecting technicians to remember everything.
Instead, they’re making sure technicians can access the right information while they’re doing the job – essentially learning and better understanding the product in the flow of the work.
Imagine diagnosing a fault and then immediately seeing the latest approved step-by-step repair procedure, the identified correct spare part, guidance for the tools and machinery you need to use, and interactive guidance that reflects the exact product configuration in front of you?!
The technician still applies their own judgement and experience, but they no longer have to rely on memory, or interrupt someone else every time uncertainty creeps in.
That approach changes the role of people like Gary as well.
Instead of answering the same questions repeatedly, they can focus on solving genuinely difficult technical problems, improving products and mentoring the next generation in ways that create lasting value.
One DRVEN customer recently estimated they save around 1,700 hours every year across just four technicians by connecting engineering and bill of materials data to automate sales and service BoMs, interactive visual parts catalogues and task-level work instructions.
They use DRVEN as a product knowledge hub, ensuring that product intelligence is available to every technician when they need it, not locked inside one person’s memory.
As OEMs face growing skills shortages, increased product complexity, and a real issue of experienced engineers approaching retirement, that principle becomes less of a nice idea and more of a business necessity.
Every company has a Gary, but the question isn’t whether you have one - it’s whether you’ve built a service organisation that can still thrive when Gary is finally able to enjoy his retirement.