A recent piece of news has sent shockwaves through the manufacturing industry.

Ford’s CEO revealed that the company currently has 5,000 unfilled machinist positions in the United States. Even with annual salaries reaching USD 120,000, they still cannot recruit enough skilled workers. Broader industry research shows that 1–25% of skilled positions remain vacant across European and North American machine tool manufacturers, resulting in 11–25% capacity loss.

China is facing the same structural trend. What was once described as a “skilled labor shortage” has now become a long-term reality.

Simply put:
There are fewer people, and experience is becoming harder to pass on.

In this context, tool management systems that rely on veteran experience, handwritten records, and manual counting are no longer capable of supporting modern production rhythms.

01

When Experience Gaps Replace “Veterans in Charge”

In the past, every well-run workshop had a few seasoned experts:

• They could tell by feel whether a tool still had life left

• They knew which tools were close to failure and which needed backup

• Daily tool consumption was already “accounted for” in their minds

Today, many of those veterans are retiring. New operators, faced with dozens of tool types and complex processes, often have no experiential reference point.

The result is predictable:

• Tool selection by guesswork

• Tool changes delayed or mistimed

• Scrap decisions made by intuition rather than data

When the workforce structure changes, a fundamental question emerges:

How do you ensure tool management without leaving experience blind spots?

02

Tools: Small Items, Big Variables

Compared with machines, programs, and processes, tools are more fragmented, less visible, and easier to overlook.

Yet tools often determine the upper and lower bounds of efficiency, cost, and quality:

• Chaotic inventory = delivery delays
  Missing tools mean idle machines and missed deadlines

• Opaque scrap = uncontrollable cost
  High tool prices plus frequent scrapping quickly erode margins

• Slow or incorrect tool changes = quality fluctuation and rework

More critically, tools often fall outside formal management systems:

• Not fully integrated into ERP

• Not governed by standardized workflows

While the industry talks about automation, smart factories, and digital production lines, tool management in many plants is still driven by people, paper, and habit. This gap has become one of the most underestimated risks in manufacturing upgrades.

03

Why the Trend Demands Systematic Tool Management

Three forces are converging:

• Skilled workers are harder to hire

• Experience is harder to transfer

• Production tempo keeps accelerating

Together, they lead to one conclusion:

Tool management must shift from people-driven to system-driven.

Because:

• When manpower is tight, memory-based processes are high-risk

• When orders are urgent, lack of standards becomes a liability

• When turnover is high, experience that isn’t captured will be lost repeatedly

Manufacturing competitiveness is no longer defined by how skilled individuals are, but by:

• Whether processes are standardized

• Whether systems are controllable

• Whether data is traceable

And tools are among the easiest areas to systematize, with fast and visible returns.

04

Turning Experience into Assets: Making Tool Management Reproducible

From years of on-site observation, Knowhy has identified a clear reality:

Tools are not just consumables — they carry process knowledge, experience, and production capability.

When tool issuance, return, scrap, and replenishment are digitized and standardized, the “invisible experience” in veterans’ minds becomes a usable operational asset.

The results are tangible:

Faster onboarding for new operators
Clear workflows, visible tool status, and defined rules reduce human error

End-to-end tool traceability
Who took which tool, used it on which machine, for how long, and why it was scrapped — all recorded

Truly controllable inventory
No more “overstocked yet still short” situations; inventory dynamically matches real usage

Simultaneous improvement in cost, efficiency, and quality
Less waste, fewer mistakes, shorter tool-change time, and more stable processes

This is not about saving a few tools.
It is about transforming tool management from a vague risk into a system-level capability.

Conclusion

In a Skilled Labor Shortage, Systems Define Resilience

The shortage of skilled workers is not temporary — it is a structural global reality.

Factories that establish standardized, traceable, and reproducible tool management systems will not be constrained by workforce fluctuations. They will be able to:

• Sustain stable quality

• Control costs

• Accept more orders with confidence

Knowhy’s mission is to help manufacturers transform tools into controllable assets, rather than hidden risks on the shop floor.

Because in today’s manufacturing landscape,
what cannot be explained cannot be controlled — and what cannot be controlled will eventually limit growth.