Is Your Roll-to-Roll Company Ready for the Exit of Experienced Workers?

An August 2025, article in US News and World Report, “US Companies Aren’t Ready for Baby Boomers to Retire,” outlines the significant amount of industry knowledge that has been and will be exiting the market and what a negative impact that loss of knowledge, or “Brain Drain” will have.

This is common in all industries, but how will this affect the roll-to-roll (R2R) industry? If you’ve been in R2R long enough, you’ve probably felt it: projects that used to move smoothly now stall on basics. The line can run, but it can’t run well. Troubleshooting takes longer. Quality drift gets normalized. And the experienced staff who used to handle the issues are no longer available.

That’s brain drain. And in R2R industries, expertise is leaving faster than it can be replaced, and often the training is insufficient. In addition, processes are becoming more complex with more raw materials, more SKUs, tighter tolerances, and more systems to interact with. The result isn’t just inconvenience, it includes real losses from lower yields, less uptime, slower scale-up, longer commissioning timelines, poor delivery, and lost customers.

R2R manufacturing is especially vulnerable because the industry relies on several complex disciplines. R2R manufacturing encompasses a chain of tightly coupled unit operations where a mistake in an early stage becomes a very expensive defect after further processing, or at the customer site. Many companies rely on a few “process whisperers,” experienced individuals who know how to tweak the line, because they’ve seen decades worth of successfully recovering from failures. When those engineers, operators, and mechanics leave, the ability to resolve these problems is often lost because much of the process knowledge was not documented.

R2R Manufacturing can be divided into eight sections which we refer to here as the eight Cs. The loss of experience will show in these eight areas and the handoffs between the stages:

1. Chemistry – material selection, compatibility, repeatable rheology, failure mechanisms
2. Compounding – dispersion, mixing, filtration, stability over time
3. Coating – die setup, process window development, uniformity, defect control
4. Curing – thermal/UV/eBeam pathways, kinetics, residuals, shrinkage
5. Conveyance – web handling, tension, nip strategy, stability, wrinkles
6. Converting – slitting, lamination, registration, die-cut, downstream yield
7. Controls – sensors, automation logic, alarms, repeatability
8. Computation – data, models, SPC, root cause analysis, digital workflows

Most companies still have pockets of excellence which might include strong chemistry or strong converting, but they struggle to connect the dots across all eight areas. Thinking of the entire system, referred to as ‘systems thinking,’ is often lost with the loss of experienced staff.

The costly loss to many companies when they lose skilled individuals is the loss of speed. Brain drain shows up as:

• Longer troubleshooting loops (more guessing, less diagnosing)
• More iterations to hit specs (trial-and-error replaces first-principles thinking)
• Lower confidence in scale-up (pilot success doesn’t translate to production)
• Over-reliance on vendors (vendors tend to focus on equipment and not process)
• Process fragility (a line that “works” until it doesn’t)

In systems as just described, the existing team often sacrifices time to learn the fundamentals of their processes because they are always in firefighting mode.

Brain drain in industry is more than just a headline. It is a slow leak that quietly turns good and stable manufacturing into reactive manufacturing. What can your R2R Manufacturing company do? If your experienced staff is still available to you, it is wise to assign your less experienced staff to document process details from the experienced staff. If that is not an option, your next best option is to work with experienced process engineers experienced in R2R Manufacturing Optimization AND Systems Development to help create guides, teaching materials, and a resource to support existing staff when needed.