Putting human expertise at the heart of industrial intelligence

Posted: February 25, 2025

Deep in Western Australia’s historic timber and mining territory, Craig Dawson faces a challenge that echoes across the global industry: the imminent loss of irreplaceable human expertise. As General Manager of Operations at Talison Lithium, the world’s largest lithium supplier, Dawson watched the company’s experienced workforce approach retirement, ready to take with them decades of irreplaceable operational knowledge. With global lithium demand surging, and the company accounting for nearly one-third of world supply, Talison couldn’t afford to lose this expertise at such a critical moment in the energy transition.

The challenge facing industry is clear and urgent: as experienced workers retire, organizations must find ways to capture, preserve and scale critical operational knowledge before it vanishes forever. The imperative is particularly acute in process-intensive industries, where success depends on the deep understanding that only comes from years of hands-on experience.

Leading organizations are discovering that the solution lies in combining human expertise with digital innovation. By embedding operator knowledge within industrial intelligence systems, companies aren’t just preserving expertise, they're transforming how teams work, make decisions, partner across supply chains and drive competitive advantage.

From individual expertise to institutional knowledge: The Talison story

At Talison’s Greenbushes facility, “Much of the plant information was locked away in the minds of the experienced team," explains Chris Milford, Manager of Operational Technology at Talison. Every day, veteran operators made crucial decisions based on years of experience – when to adjust process parameters, how to prevent equipment failures, why certain production issues occurred.

Working with AVEVA, Talison created a digital infrastructure that captured and amplified operator expertise. The system turned decades of operator insights and paper records into a unified, real-time knowledge base. Now, equipment patterns, process stoppages and production rates weren’t just numbers – they were enriched with operator context about why issues occurred and how to resolve them.

The impact was transformative. “AVEVA Production Management enabled us to optimize our entire plant performance," explains Craig Dawson. "By identifying and analyzing repeating small downtime events, we built up a clear view of our daily and weekly performance and identified where we were losing production to delays or asset failures."

The results spoke for themselves: operators now spotted potential problems before they occurred, engineers analyzed root causes 50% faster, and production teams identified and eliminated bottlenecks. Most importantly, as new operators joined, they learned from their predecessors' accumulated wisdom, creating a cycle of continuous improvement. Talison’s operators moved from reactive to proactive, pursuing realistic operation targets in near real time. This reduced both problem resolution time and production losses, while exposing process constraints that had previously limited performance.

Scaling knowledge transfer in complex manufacturing: The BASF experience  

As industries grapple with climate change, resource scarcity and supply chain disruption, traditional approaches to operational excellence no longer suffice. This challenge is particularly evident in complex manufacturing, where at BASF’s Ludwigshafen headquarters, the world’s largest chemical company faced a daunting reality: 50% of its plant operators would retire within a decade. This would require the training of 300 new operators annually while ensuring the safety and efficiency of their complex operations.

“We found that AVEVA's virtual reality training environment offered us unique advantages," explains Alexander Lang, Training Leader at BASF. "We could create an accurate virtual training environment that enables teams not just to learn the basic procedures and processes they needed to follow, but also to understand the consequences of their actions in a fully immersive simulation. Because many of our apprentices were born in the internet age, they truly appreciated the digital approach."

Through their digital training solution, BASF created an intuitive system that allowed new operators to safely manage complex chemical processes. The virtual environment provided sustainability benefits by simulating chemical processes without using energy or raw materials. Most importantly, it created a bridge between generations of expertise, allowing seasoned operators to embed their knowledge into training scenarios that new recruits could understand and learn from.

These successes demonstrate how human-centered operations enable more accurate decision-making, accelerate innovation cycles, and drive sustainable performance through expert insights. Most importantly, they create adaptable, resilient organizations capable of meeting tomorrow's challenges through enhanced collaboration across the value chain.

The human-tech partnership transforming industry

The experiences at Talison and BASF reveal a deeper truth about industrial innovation: technology's greatest power lies in amplifying human capabilities, not replacing them. This approach is driving substantial investment, with the market for human-centered industrial technology projected to reach $658.4B by 2032.^[1] In a world facing climate change, demographic shifts, and supply chain disruption, organizations are recognizing that competitive advantage comes from combining human insight with digital innovation.

As one Talison executive notes, "While the global transition to cleaner energy relies on the lithium we mine, we rely on the people who make that possible." This captures the essence of modern industrial transformation: when organizations preserve and scale human expertise, they don't just improve current operations – they build adaptable teams capable of meeting tomorrow's challenges. They create networks of shared knowledge that strengthen entire industrial ecosystems. The future isn't about replacing human knowledge – it's about putting it at the heart of industrial intelligence and multiplying its impact across the connected industrial economy.

Connect with industry leaders who are successfully combining human expertise with industrial intelligence at AVEVA World.

^{[1] 12 Global Megatrends Explained [2025-2030] | StartUs Insights}