How and why we need to capture tacit knowledge in manufacturing: Case studies of visual inspection

Human visual inspection skills remain superior for ensuring product quality and conformance to standards in the manufacturing industry. However, at present these skills cannot be formally shared with other workers or used to develop and implement new solutions or assistive technologies because they involve a high level of tacit knowledge which only exists in skilled operators' internal cognitions. Industry needs reliable methods for the capture and analysis of this tacit knowledge so that it can be shared and not lost but also so that it can be best utilised in the transfer of manual work to automated systems and introduction of new technologies and processes. This paper describes two UK manufacturing case studies that applied systematic task analysis methods to capture and scrutinise the tacit knowledge and skills being applied in the visual inspection of aerospace components. Results reveal that the method was effective in eliciting tacit knowledge, and showed that tacit skills are particularly needed when visual inspection standards lack specification or the task requires greater subjective interpretation. The implications of these findings for future research and for developments in the manufacturing industry are discussed.