Process knowledge is what lets you replicate a line in another plant, industrialise a product or transfer technology to an industrial partner.
To turn it into a real asset we need two things: to digitalise it and to protect it.
Digitalising it makes it belong to the company and not to one plant or a handful of people. Before digitalising you have to put things in order, and I wrote about that in «measure twice, cut once».
The way we protect it is going to change at the root with quantum computing. Today it still does not break the encryption that protects our information, and nobody knows for certain when it will. But Europe has already set dates: the roadmap marks the end of 2026 to begin the transition to post-quantum cryptography, and 2030 as the deadline for high-risk uses.
The reason is simple.
What is copied today can be stored and read when the technology allows it.
For information that expires in months it does not matter. For process knowledge, which is worth something for decades, it does.
So the question is not technical, it is a leadership one: which part of what we know has to stay confidential ten years from now, across how many systems, plants and suppliers it is spread, and whether those who hold it have a plan for when the encryption changes.