What an Aircraft Hangar Reveals About the Flow of Critical Operational Intelligence
In highly regulated environments knowledge isn’t some abstract concept. It’s physical and time bound. Job cards, inspection records and compliance documents are the operational memory that keeps people safe. And when access to that memory gets delayed or distorted, you feel the impact — even when it doesn’t show up on a balance sheet.
One of the most persistent blind spots in knowledge management is print. Across B2B organizations, printing often gets treated as background noise. A utility that simply exists, or maybe a hangover from a more analogue world.
But print workflows carry some of the most critical knowledge assets, yet you won’t see them on many digital transformation roadmaps, because they rarely get the same scrutiny as cloud spend, inventory optimization or workforce planning. But they really should.
A universal blind spot, hiding in plain sight
Most leaders would struggle to answer a simple question: how long does it take for an essential document to reach the technician who needs it?
It’s a tough question, because in most organizations print tends to sit awkwardly between systems. Not quite IT, not quite facilities, and not quite ops. And if no one owns the friction, it can unfortunately become normalized. Technicians work around it, supervisors factor it into schedules, and IT fields the endless tickets. The organization absorbs the cost without ever actually recognizing it.
In knowledge-intensive, regulated sectors, like aviation, that friction genuinely matters. We’ve seen how small, repeated delays in documentation access end up being far more than inefficiencies; they’re knowledge-latency costs that slow decision cycles and introduce avoidable risk.
The KLM hangar: how far would you walk for a printer?
At KLM Engineering — a subsidiary of KLM — this blind spot became visible when daily maintenance routines were examined through a workflow lens, rather than a tech one. When we sat down with KLM, we found that technicians were routinely walking up to 273 yards each way to collect printed job cards and inspection packs, with each aircraft check generating between 5,000 and 20,000 pages of documentation. None of this was unusual in isolation. What mattered was the accumulation.
The printers weren’t broken, the network wasn’t failing, but the fact was that operational knowledge was physically distant from where the work happened. And it was costing KLM hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Every walk introduced delay, interruptions and the potential for human error. Tiny, little moments of friction, repeated hundreds of times a day.
Putting numbers on what you can’t see
With KLM, our first order of business was to assess the scale of the problem. Once the workflow was mapped, the economics became straightforward.
If a technician loses roughly ten minutes per day retrieving documentation, that translates to 16.6 hours of lost productive time, per day, multiplied by 100 engineers. At a fully loaded labor rate of $60 per hour, that equates to roughly $240,000 per year in time alone. This figure excludes overtime premiums, schedule compression or the downstream effects of delayed signoffs.
The print volume told a similar story. For KLM, a modest five per cent reduction in unnecessary output across 1,000 aircraft checks removed between 250,000 and one million sheets from circulation, depending on check type. That reduction alone helped lower direct costs for KLM, cut waste, and reduce their carbon footprint. All without changing the core work itself.
Protect your knowledge chain, and your mental health
In aviation, as well as in healthcare, energy and advanced manufacturing, documentation is inseparable from safety. They’re one and the same thing. When access to the correct, current version of a document is delayed or unreliable, the risks tend to increase.
It’s why reliable, secure, at-point printing protects the integrity of the knowledge chain. It makes sure technicians are working from the right information, with clear traceability and minimal overlap. Look at it the other way: misprints, jams and reruns inflate helpdesk demand and pull IT into reactive support, often interrupting work at precisely the wrong time.
There’s also a human factor, which bears remembering. Each unnecessary step adds cognitive load (and for KLM engineers, remember, that was hundreds of steps each way, multiple times a day).
Seeing the systemic upside
When KLM modernized its print workflow, and moved their printers closer to the job site, the benefits were immediate. Documentation reached technicians faster. Interruptions were no longer an issue. Productivity improved. Staff satisfaction also bounced back, as a long-standing annoyance was quietly removed from the daily grind.
IT teams saw fewer print-related tickets, which freed up capacity for proactive system improvements. Sustainability outcomes became measurable and defensible, aligning with KLM’s broader ESG commitments.
And perhaps most importantly, cleaner workflows created clearer feedback loops. When knowledge moves smoothly, it’s always easier to spot gaps and improve your processes. Just like small problems can spiral and multiply, small fixes can compound into systemic improvement.
A repeatable diagnostic for leaders
This lesson is not about aviation maintenance alone. Any organization that relies on printed knowledge can apply a simple workflow audit by considering the following:
- How far does critical documentation travel?
- How many touchpoints exist between creation and use?
- How often are documents reprinted, corrected or delayed?
- How much IT effort is spent putting out (figurative) printer fires?
From there, improvements naturally tier themselves:
- Quick wins: better printer placement, smarter routing, and basic rules that bring information closer to the point of work.
- Mid-term fixes: things that can wait, like workflow automation and Find-Me printing, to reduce errors and waste.
- Strategic redesign: long-term goals, like integrating print logic into broader operational and knowledge-management systems.
Equally important is communication. If you’re going to overhaul your print workflows, you need to align procurement, facilities, IT and frontline teams. Get them on the same A4 page, so to speak.
The KLM case demonstrated that meaningful gains often come from strengthening the smallest, most repeated touchpoints. Strategic levers are important, but little details matter too. Something as simple as the physical distance between a plane and a printer—in KLM’s case, that was all it took to unlock massive operational gains. Sometimes, the smartest knowledge-management move is simply making sure the right information arrives exactly where it’s needed. Minus the long walk.
Mat Buttrey
Mat spends many of his working hours listening to healthcare partners and customers around the world. This approach is driven by his pursuit of technical excellence in print management software for the healthcare industry. Mat set up PaperCut Software’s dedicated healthcare team in 2019 and continues to champion the innovation around printing, scanning, and faxing within the healthcare world.