What is tribal knowledge costing your shop?

This is an estimate, not a measurement. It applies your inputs to published industry benchmarks — the Deloitte & Manufacturing Institute skills-gap study, BLS JOLTS turnover data, and NIST MEP. The multipliers below are transparent, deliberately conservative assumptions — not figures from a proprietary study. Adjust them to your own experience.

Setup errors: jobs/week × 52 × (setup_time/60) × hourly_rate × scrap_rate × 0.4 — the 0.4 factor isolates scrap attributable to undocumented procedures.

Downtime: jobs/week × 52 × (setup_time/60) × 0.15 × hourly_rate — assumes 15% of setup time is spent searching for information.

Onboarding: employees × turnover × salary × (months/12) × 0.6 — 0.6 represents the productivity gap during ramp-up.

Key-person risk: employees × 0.04 × salary × 2 — 4% annual probability of a key knowledge-holder departing, valued at 2× salary in lost institutional knowledge.

Recovery (40–60%): based on published case studies (Dozuki, HEINEKEN, Novy). Actual recovery depends on implementation quality.