Patrick Murray

Head of Strategy at @razor_uk who's currently learning about:

🏗️ Product development
🌳 Sustainable economics
⚙️ Data driven manufacturing

[Patrick Murray @patrickdm_]

Manufacturing keeps investing in automation while leaving knowledge management to PDFs and tribal memory. The Silver Tsunami is about to make that imbalance very expensive.

[Patrick Murray @patrickdm_]

Manufacturing's incoming workforce is digitally native. They're inheriting a world of analogue expertise. Handing them a SharePoint login and wishing them luck is not a transition plan.

[Patrick Murray @patrickdm_]

"Institutional intelligence decoupled from headcount" is a useful test. Ask it about your plant. If the answer is uncomfortable, you know what to work on.

[Patrick Murray @patrickdm_]

A 30-year veteran retiring should be a celebration. In most plants it's a quiet emergency. That's a systems problem, not a people problem.

[Patrick Murray @patrickdm_]

When Bob leaves the factory floor, the goal isn't to find more people like Bob. It's to stop making Bob the only place Bob's knowledge lives.

[Patrick Murray @patrickdm_]

The real actionable knowledge in most plants isn't in the manuals. It's in shift-handover notes and scribbled notebooks. Unsearchable, unverified, and walking out the door with the person who wrote it.

[Patrick Murray @patrickdm_]

When a machine goes down, an operator has about 120 seconds before the shift's OEE takes a hit. Design your knowledge systems for that window. Not for the audit.

[Patrick Murray @patrickdm_]

Employees spend 20% of their working week looking for information. In manufacturing, that search tax doesn't just hit productivity. It hits safety, quality, and downtime.

[Patrick Murray @patrickdm_]

Moving SOPs from a binder to SharePoint is not digitisation. It's the same friction in a different folder. Three versions of the same procedure with no indication of which is current is not a solved problem.

[Patrick Murray @patrickdm_]

"Have the new guy shadow Bob" is not a knowledge transfer strategy. It makes Bob less productive, creates a single point of failure, and passes down his bad habits alongside his good ones.

[Patrick Murray @patrickdm_]

Manufacturing doesn't have a skills gap. It has a knowledge architecture problem. The distinction matters because they have completely different solutions.

[Patrick Murray @patrickdm_]

The veteran who can diagnose a hydraulic fault by the pitch of a motor isn't just an employee. He's infrastructure. And there's no offboarding process for infrastructure.

[Patrick Murray @patrickdm_]

26% of the manufacturing workforce is over 55. That's not a statistic. That's a countdown.

[Patrick Murray @patrickdm_]

Start small.
Solve real problems.
Involve real people.

What blockers are you running into in your projects?

[Patrick Murray @patrickdm_]

Blocker 3: No shop floor buy-in
Frontline teams aren't just users, they're key partners.

👉 Involve them in the pilot
👉 Test early, get feedback
👉 Prove the goal is making their day easier

[Patrick Murray @patrickdm_]

Digital transformation rarely fails because of bad tech, it fails because of data no one can access, ROI no one can prove and tools no one wants to use.

[Patrick Murray @patrickdm_]

Blocker 2: Decision makers don’t see ROI
ROI isn’t something you find later. You define it before you start.

👉 Pilot small
👉 Measure ruthlessly
👉 Speak in language they get: downtime, rework, hours saved

[Patrick Murray @patrickdm_]

There are 3 silent (or sometimes loud) killers of digital projects in manufacturing...
I've seen them over and over again.
Here's what they are, and what you can do about them 🧵

[Patrick Murray @patrickdm_]

Blocker 1: Data is trapped in siloed people and systems
Fix it by mapping a key process end-to-end. Then ask:

👉 Who owns the data?
👉 How is it accessed?
👉 What decisions rely on it?

Now pick ONE silo and make that data usable as simply as possible.

[Patrick Murray @patrickdm_]

@pronounced_kyle Think our little ones are a similar age - mines currently up 4:50am every morning 🥲