#958 1985 · Campbell Soup Company (with Texas Instruments) · Food manufacturing
Campbell's put its one irreplaceable cooker expert's diagnosis on a disk before he left
the problem
Campbell's giant cookers broke in ways only 44-year veteran Aldo Cimino could diagnose, and he was retiring
background
Campbell's sterilizer cookers stood seventy-two feet tall and heated tens of thousands of cans of soup at a time to 250 degrees; a malfunction that went undiagnosed for long could shut down a plant's output. Over 44 years, Cimino had built a diagnostic sense for these machines that no manual captured and that no successor had been given time to absorb.
The standard defense against losing a sole expert was succession planning: assign an apprentice years ahead of retirement and hope enough shadowing transferred the instinct for spotting a failing cooker before the veteran's last day. Cimino's retirement date was close enough that this path no longer had years left to run.
what everyone would do
The standard response to a single point of failure like Cimino was succession planning: assign an apprentice years before retirement and hope enough shadowing transferred the instinct before Cimino's last day.
what they saw
Herrod and Campbell's realized Cimino's skill wasn't mystical — it was a specific sequence of diagnostic questions, extractable through structured interviews, not something only years of osmosis could transmit.
the move
Campbell's worked with Texas Instruments engineer Richard Herrod to interview Cimino directly and encode his diagnostic reasoning into a rule-based expert system, first called Cooker Advisor and then nicknamed 'Aldo on a Disk,' letting any plant operator diagnose a cooker fault by answering the program's questions the way they would have asked Cimino himself.
why it works
A junior operator facing a cooker fault didn't need Cimino's forty-four years of hands-on repair experience; they needed his diagnostic decision tree, the specific sequence of questions he asked before reaching a conclusion. Once that sequence was captured as software questions any operator could answer, the software could return Cimino's own conclusion instantly, without the operator ever having built Cimino's intuition themselves. The interview process, not years of apprenticeship, was the actual bottleneck removed.
the payoff
The system, renamed Simon, was deployed across Campbell's plants and kept diagnosing cooker faults for years after Cimino's retirement.
where it breaks
This only works if the expert can articulate their own diagnostic process when asked directly; some experts truly cannot verbalize what they sense, and interviewing them yields an incomplete rule base that fails on exactly the edge cases the expert would have caught. It also requires starting the interviews with real lead time before the expert leaves.
what came after
The 'Aldo on a Disk' story became a widely cited case in the 1980s knowledge-engineering literature for capturing a single irreplaceable expert's tacit troubleshooting knowledge before it walked out the door for good.
references
- [1]Expert Systems and Knowledge-Based Engineering (1984-1991): Implications for Instructional Systems ResearchERIC / Journal of Applied Instructional Design, 2022files.eric.ed.gov