When the experts leave - how labs preserve knowledge and onboard new employees faster

Knowledge loss due to staff turnover, retirement, or role changes is one of the biggest, yet often underestimated, risks in the lab. The whitepaper offers practical insight into how fragile dependencies on individual employees develop - and how they can be systematically reduced. Using concrete examples from medical and industrial labs, it highlights typical problem areas: long onboarding times, unnecessary service visits, quality risks, and unstable processes for complex methods (e.g., LC-MS, FAME analysis). The whitepaper covers: what types of knowledge need to be preserved in the lab (SOPs vs. hands-on experience), how knowledge management, equipment management, and logbooks work together effectively, and what structured onboarding and training concepts can look like, along with the necessary steps

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