← Back to Field Notes

August 12, 2025 · The Bloomfield Team

How Fluid Power Manufacturers Are Solving the Knowledge Gap

A hydraulic manifold manufacturer in Wisconsin has 14 engineers. Three of them are over 60. Those three designed 70% of the custom valve assemblies the company produces, and between them they hold the institutional knowledge for over 2,400 unique part configurations, each with specific material requirements, test pressures, port configurations, and assembly sequences that were never fully documented in any system.

The National Fluid Power Association reported that the fluid power industry's average workforce age continues to climb, with 25% of the technical workforce eligible for retirement within five years. For manufacturers of custom hydraulic and pneumatic components, the knowledge concentration problem is acute because the work is inherently custom. Every manifold, every valve body, every cylinder design involves engineering decisions that depend on application-specific knowledge built over decades.

Why Fluid Power Is Different

Standard machining knowledge transfers reasonably well between shops. An experienced CNC programmer can move from one shop to another and be productive within weeks. Fluid power manufacturing adds layers of application-specific knowledge that do not transfer. The engineer who designed a proportional valve assembly for a 4,000 PSI mobile hydraulic system knows that the spool geometry requires a specific lapping process to achieve the required leakage rate. They know that the body material for that pressure rating needs to be 4140 rather than 1018. They know that the port threads need to be SAE O-ring boss rather than NPT because the customer's system cycles 50 times per minute and NPT will leak within 6 months.

That knowledge lives in the engineer's experience, in handwritten notes in the margins of drawings, and in email exchanges with the customer's application engineer from 2008. It does not live in the ERP, in the BOM, or in any structured database.

For a broader look at this challenge across manufacturing, see our guide to manufacturing knowledge management.

What the Best Shops Are Doing

The fluid power manufacturers solving this problem are doing three things.

First, they are structuring product configuration knowledge into searchable databases. Every custom manifold the company has ever built represents a set of engineering decisions: material, pressure rating, port configuration, flow path, valve cavity sizes, surface finish requirements, and test protocols. Capturing those decisions in a structured format means the next engineer who gets a similar request can find the relevant precedent in minutes rather than reinventing the design from scratch or guessing at parameters the original engineer chose for specific reasons.

Second, they are connecting quoting data to engineering data. When a customer sends an RFQ for a custom hydraulic manifold, the estimator needs to know the engineering complexity before they can price it. How many valve cavities, what pressure rating, whether it requires flow testing, whether the port configuration has been built before. Connecting the engineering configuration database to the quoting workflow means the estimator can identify comparable past designs and price the new job against actual cost data from similar work. The gap between quoted and actual costs on custom fluid power components typically runs 15 to 30% when estimators work from memory. It drops to 5 to 10% when they work from comparable actuals.

Third, they are building design rule systems that capture engineering judgment. A senior hydraulic engineer knows that a crossover passage between two valve cavities needs a minimum wall thickness based on the system pressure, the material, and the fatigue cycle count. That rule is not in any textbook for the specific materials and geometries this shop works with. It was learned through 30 years of testing, field failures, and engineering analysis. Documenting those design rules in a system that applies them automatically when a new manifold is being configured preserves the judgment even after the engineer who developed it retires.

The ROI Case

A fluid power manufacturer that loses a senior engineer without capturing their knowledge typically sees three impacts. Quoting time on custom work doubles because the replacement engineer lacks the pattern recognition to price complex configurations quickly. Engineering errors on new designs increase because design rules that were carried in memory are not applied. And customer response time slows, which in the fluid power market where OEMs have tight development schedules can mean losing the program entirely.

The shops that invest in knowledge capture systems while their senior people are still active see returns in three areas: faster quoting on custom work, fewer engineering errors on new configurations, and the ability to take on design work they would otherwise have to decline because the knowledge to support it was concentrated in too few people.

The fluid power industry has always been built by specialists. The question now is whether the knowledge those specialists carry survives them. The technology to ensure it does is available today.