Georgia-Pacific

Georgia-Pacific's scale — approximately 200 manufacturing facilities and 35,000 employees producing tissue, pulp, packaging, and building products — made it acutely vulnerable to demographic workforce shifts. By 2015, a significant share of the company's skilled plant operators and technicians were aged 55 or older, concentrating decades of hands-on operational knowledge in workers approaching retirement. In consumer goods manufacturing, this tacit expertise — equipment calibration habits, process troubleshooting sequences, line-specific quality adjustments — is rarely documented and nearly impossible to reconstruct after departure. Without intervention, each retirement represented not just headcount loss but irreplaceable institutional memory, with downstream risks to throughput, quality consistency, and safety compliance across the entire facility network.

Georgia-Pacific partnered with Rockwell Automation to deploy a connected workforce platform across its operations — a company-wide digital transformation anchored in IoT sensors and connected worker technology. The initiative focused on digitizing operational knowledge at the point of work: equipping frontline employees with digital tools that captured procedures, troubleshooting workflows, and equipment-specific guidance in structured, reusable formats. Rather than treating knowledge capture as a one-time documentation project, the platform embedded it into daily workflows so experienced workers naturally contributed institutional knowledge as they performed their jobs. The connected architecture also gave newer employees real-time access to that knowledge base on the plant floor, reducing dependence on informal mentorship chains and enabling more consistent cross-facility training standards across Georgia-Pacific's geographically distributed operations.

The initiative produced a meaningfully more connected workforce across Georgia-Pacific's approximately 200 facilities, with the primary outcome being the systematic capture of critical operational knowledge ahead of the anticipated retirement wave. Key outcomes included:

• Knowledge preservation: Veteran employees' operational expertise documented and made accessible company-wide before attrition
• Improved onboarding: New hires able to access structured digital guidance at the point of work, reducing reliance on ad hoc mentorship
• Workforce competitiveness: Company positioned to maintain production quality and operational continuity through generational workforce transitions across all product lines

The transformation demonstrated that treating workforce knowledge as a managed digital asset — rather than an informal byproduct of tenure — is a practical strategy for large-scale consumer goods manufacturers navigating demographic headwinds.

• Consumer goods manufacturers with aging workforces should quantify knowledge risk proactively: map which roles hold critical undocumented expertise and prioritize capture before retirements accelerate.
• Connected worker platforms deliver the most value when knowledge capture is embedded into daily operations rather than treated as a separate documentation burden imposed on workers.
• Enterprise-scale deployments across hundreds of facilities require standardized IoT infrastructure; a fragmented, site-by-site approach will fail to produce a consistent, searchable knowledge base.
• Start the initiative before the retirement wave peaks — once experienced workers leave, the window to capture their expertise closes permanently and cannot be reopened.