Role of Knowledge Lifecycle in Manufacturing

Henry Ford transformed manufacturing through process innovation in automobile industry. May be a random thought, intuition and highly conscious experience of few people for a very long time might have driven him and his team to think about the productivity improvement and make that big change. But the real need in today’s growing business environment is scalability.

The Report

Note: Economist Intelligence Unit Surveyed 315 companies in the manufacturing industry

Key Findings

• Companies find it difficult to capture and make use of knowledge from external partners
• Lack of communication and a hoarding of knowledge continue to hamper internal communications
• Many companies do not know the extent of their IP but are gradually starting to look to external partners as potential sources
• An important goal of knowledge management is seen to be the sharing of best practice
• Companies must think carefully about the communication channels that best serve their objectives

Technology remains an important tool in knowledge management. And technology can also enhance the comfort zone for companies that want to share knowledge with suppliers and partners. Gartner, the business analyst, sees the emergence of “communities of trust”, which it describes as a combination of social conventions and technical standards necessary to support expansive collaboration.

Solution

The only option to do this is to institutionalize knowledge across the factory that will address the entire knowledge lifecycle including content, collaboration, communication, competency, collective working, change management and so on.

Institutionalizing Knowledge

This will ensure that big and continuous improvements can take place at regular intervals. Thousands and millions of people working in a factory setup require a systematic approach to collectively drive learning, innovation and smart execution across the organization instead of making it an adhoc activity.

Collective Knowledge

It is vital to leverage the collective intelligence for continuously optimizing performance, minimizing defects, proactively avoiding big problems and change the way the workforce connect, learn and work in factories.

The following step by step approach to manage knowledge can help build a high performance and smart workforce.

Knowledge Lifecycle

1. Content Lifecycle to bring all the relevant & up-to-date information such as policies, operational manual, factory design, product design, machinery guide book, training video, audio, images and so on at the fingertips of the workforce in a highly secured way. From planning to creation and continuous validation & archival is addressed.
2. Team & Collaboration Lifecycle to build high performance team, drive interaction both traditional and new technological approaches and harness the true ability of the workforce. Workers across the factory sites can share the common lessons learned and exchange information on how to address a particular issue. The new communication platform is vital to ensure perfect dissemination of information.
3. Enterprise Innovation Lifecycle to create the structure and right platforms to drive the flow of ideas at all levels and across the organization for continuous improvement. Even the factory workers will have the choice of sharing their thinking on preventing issues, optimizing work and so on.
4. Talent & Learning Lifecycle to systematically drive personalized learning to right people at right time using multiple models & simple technologies depending on the learning style and category of workers for achieving complete workforce transformation. Competency of the people from welders, fitters, supervisors to design team can be managed & monitored scientifically. It will help find right person & build the best possible team for the tasks on hand.
5. Process & Task Lifecycle to scientifically manage activities, link to right knowledge, align right talent from workers at the factory floor all the way to the research team and help complete the task on time. The inefficiency patterns in the workplace can be identified and addressed.
6. Performance & Change Lifecycle to monitor the progress of change using personal, team and enterprise scorecards. Helps implement certain new approaches and drive change with lot more clarity. It will help in the performance review and promotion for each and every employee in the factory.

This will give you the broader picture on the possibilities of institutionalizing knowledge in the factory environment.

Regularly follow this blog. We will keep on adding more manufacturing specific details for each of these six steps so that you can drill down in each of the above links to know more. Feel free to comment and ask specific question. We will try our best to answer.

To discuss about your specific needs in your factory environment, contact our experts at greatwork@lpcube.com.