Gartner just published a paper titled “Best Practices for Capturing Knowledge from Retiring Employees”. This paper stresses a familiar theme in PLM: product knowledge is created throughout a company, but how does a company ensure this knowledge is not lost when a person leaves? The paper cites a well-known statistic that 50% of an individual’s knowledge is “lost” when they leave. Given the aging workforce of some industries such as Energy and Aerospace, this is a critical problem.
Often a PLM implementation just focuses on part of the solution, which is “vaulting” of product information. This basically means making it possible and easy for a user to upload files (documents, designs, etc.) to the system and fill out some information about the file. While this is the basic pre-requisite to knowledge capture, it is often implemented imperfectly. How often are the files uploaded with incomplete or non-existent attributes filled out? Even if the attributes are filled out, how useful are they to ensure proper reuse? Failure to do this well, lessens the ability to search for the information.
As an example of imperfect knowledge capture, consider that many companies collect their information in the context of a product development project. While this is a good start, most projects are not defined in the context of a product technology taxonomy. The projects are often based on a calendar year or release designation of some sort, which again hinders reuse.
One of the ways ENOVIA addresses this issue is through its embedded EXALEAD full-text indexing and search. The internal Dassault Systèmes implementation of ENOVIA includes the use of EXALEAD and it greatly helps the user find information. However, the value of the indexing, and the resulting taxonomy, is limited to what can be interpreted from the file content, and the value/meaning of the attributes entered to explain the file (and chosen for the indexing).
For more formal approaches to reuse, some ENOVIA customers are turning to ENOVIA Variant Configuration Central and/or ENOVIA Library Central. With ENOVIA Variant Configuration Central, the entire product line of the company can be defined and linked to the actual development projects. More importantly, the feature capabilities of the products are also identified. This means that the project is just not just capturing the work. It is capturing the work for a specific product with specific capabilities. In other words, there is now more information available to know which projects to check for reusable content.
With ENOVIA Library Central, standard taxonomies are implemented to organize the data that is produced. Importantly, there can be multiple taxonomies defined and used to organize a single piece of information. This means the information can be perfectly classified for different user communities such as R&D, Marketing, Purchasing, etc. To succeed, a company must make sure that its release processes for the uploaded files and data include this step of proper classification.
As usual, I would be interested in learning more about how companies are addressing the knowledge capture and reuse challenge. Thanks in advance for any input you can provide.
- Jon
