Smart Education

The increase in the number of colleges and the number of students going through higher education are mind-boggling. Imagine the need of number of quality teachers and number of repetition in class-room sessions. Research report shows that there only 25% of the people are employable and organizations spend as high as $5000 & approximately one year to bring fresh employees up to speed.

Challenges Faced

by Education Institutions

• Rote learning leading to high un-employability
• Big disconnect from the industry
• Intensive competition

by Students

• Too much of theory but low self-sufficiency for any job
• 40 subjects, 7 practical labs, mini projects and big projects with a poor learning roadmap
• Low visibility into career plan
• Big disconnect between what they learn and what they want to do
• Low awareness on working in team, thinking & poor communication

by Industry

• High learning cost shrinking profitability
• Long learning curve leading to low quality & productivity
• Talent scarcity affecting growth

The Knowledge Ocean

Two decades ago, our learning resources are very limited. For any major subject, there were only one or two faculties, few friends and a couple of books. That is it and nothing more. We never get lost if we have little bit of focus and energy. Now, there are hundreds of website, thousands of blogs, many books, many journals, millions of web pages, thousands of experts around the globe and multiple opinions for any popular subjects. Can anyone go through all of them? Can anyone even think about searching & looking at them without a plan and goals in mind?

Personal Learning Navigator

If individuals do not perfectly focus and drive the learning in line with the personal goal, will either get lost in the knowledge ocean or do not even complete their learning journey. Many are not intensive learners so the learning model cannot make them tiered and feel bored about learning. When the perfect roadmap is available, an individual will go through without getting lost. Isn’t it great?

It is very essential to discover our desires and goals. Only after this assessment, one can start their long learning journey. Otherwise, the people will only spend the energy and time to travel but land in a wrong place. This could be the pathetic state one could be in. I have monitored, motivated and guided thousands of college students. I watch this space quite closely.

Talent Visibility

Because of the exponential growth in students’ population, employment, learning resources and expertise, we must be smart and scale up to this growth otherwise quality will be affected.

We must smartly learn what is necessary, position our talent in this competitive market place and work extra smart to keep our job.

The Perfect Learning Platform

• Learning Network that connects related people for leveraging the collective competency.
• Campus Learning to plan, organize and drive systematic learning programs to ensure high level of employability
• Personal Learning Navigator to guide individuals through the sources of learning and help them learn the right thing nothing more and nothing less
• Knowledge Management and Smart Collaboration to harness the collective knowledge
• Learning Content Management to systematically plan, collaborate, create, refine and organize the content for learning programs
• Talent Connect to plan, certify and position individual talent in line with the job opportunity
• Talent Discovery through the talent connect for quickly identifying the right person for the job
• Scalable & complete learning platform to drive accelerated learning and drive proper knowledge acquisition

The Beneficiaries

All colleges and schools offering higher education:

• It empowers the campus and help reach out to the world to consolidate and deliver knowledge continuously and cost-effectively. It energizes the stakeholders such as students, faculties, alumni, curriculum designers, industry experts and so on.
• Smart Campus should be deployed for improving quality of learning. It can transform the education institutions to deliver real learning.

Business Enterprises:

• Learning system can be used by business enterprises to bring down their learning cost and improve the collective talent. This effective learning model maximizes the learning potential and can bring down the workplace stress.
• Learning is not a one time activity. This solution helps drive continuous learning to ensure that the employees are up-to-date.

Individuals:

• Individuals in institutions and workplace can embrace the personal KM and learning system to drive their personal learning, certify and position for great visibility in this crowded market place.

For more details, please contact us greatwork@lpcube.com

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.