Manufacturing knowledge reuse for product design

In today’s world there is ever increasing pressure to bring products to market in a quicker and more time-ly fashion that fulfill customers’ needs and are delivered on budget. One way to aid such acceleration of the design and development process is to effectively share and reuse manufacturing knowledge in an ef-fort to bring about product based interoperability. This paper reports upon the work being carried out in the SAMULET research programme that addresses such factors. It focuses upon (i) how the sources of in-formation and knowledge were recognized, (ii) the definition and categorisation of knowledge and (iii) the potential routes for the reuse of manufacturing knowledge. The research approach is currently being developed to help augment a supportive information and knowledge sharing environment and bring about a more integrated development process within a high tech aerospace company

The reuse of machining knowledge to improve designer awareness through the configuration of knowledge libraries in PLM

The nature of competition induces the need to constantly improve and perform better. For global aerospace manufacturers, this is as timely an epithet as ever as market forces urge for more growth, better financial return and market position. The macroeconomic aspect is compounded by the growth of product complexity and the need for higher product quality, hence the drive to reduce waste places emphasis upon production costs and the need to improve product performance. This paper focuses upon a rapid development and deployment method that enables the capture and representation of machining knowledge so that it may be shared and reused by design engineers to accelerate the design-make process. The study and mapping of information and knowledge relationships are described and put forward as a lightweight ontology. From this, a set of knowledge document templates were created to facilitate the capture, structuring and sharing of machining knowledge within a collaborative multidisciplinary aerospace engineering environment. An experimental pilot system has been developed to test and demonstrate that knowledge document templates can accelerate the sharing of machining knowledge within an industrial product lifecycle management environment. The results are discussed to provide a case for further development and application within the product domain

The Evolution of Design Principles Enabling Knowledge Reuse for Projects: An Action Design Research Project

Knowledge is a fuzzy phenomenon and managing it a complex endeavor. In particular, knowledge reuse possesses the possibility to increase project performance since project teams can benefit from knowledge of former projects. Therefore, knowledge reuse is an essential knowledge management (KM) process phase that needs to receive special attention. Studying KM in general requires one to consider both social and technical aspects. On the one hand, KM highly depends on individuals, their interactions with each other, organizational rules, and cultural aspects forming KM’s social perspective. On the other hand, contemporary information technologies promise to support organizations, teams, and individuals in managing what they know. Today, the KM research field is tremendous and full of social and technical insights. However, independent of which aspect of KM is studied, most researchers follow either a technology-driven approach for building innovative KM technologies or a behavioral-research approach to observe and understand complex KM phenomena. Few papers report the design of a KM system that integrates the social and technical perspective by expressing and evaluating design principles according the design science research approach. In this paper, we address this challenge and present a comprehensive action design research (ADR) project in the context of managing project knowledge reuse. Thereby, we present our KMS artifact called Just KNow and discuss the entire process from specifying its requirements to its implementation step by step. This paper helps KM researchers and practitioners make informed decisions. We support researchers in deciding whether the ADR approach is appropriate for their particular research project and provide a guideline for how to apply ADR. We support practitioners by helping them make design decisions when creating and implementing an effective KMS

KNOWLEDGE WASTE IN ORGANIZATIONS: A REVIEW OF PREVIOUS STUDIES

In this paper, we are interested in the knowledge that is “wasted” in organizations, that is existing relevant knowledge that is overlooked in the process of knowledge conversion. Given the competitive pressure firms are facing in today´s business environment, a waste of knowledge is not only costly but also dangerous. This means that we consider knowledge from a knowledge at risk perspective. Having this in mind, the purpose of this paper is to review research on knowledge waste in organizations to establish our current body of knowledge regarding this topic. The study consists of a systematic review of 51 peer-reviewed articles addressing knowledge waste in organizations. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no systematic literature review on this topic has previously been published or presented. The topic seems to be a promising field for intensive research and offers a variety of future research avenues. In view of practitioners, the study´s finding may enable an increased awareness towards the areas where existing knowledge is at the mercy of “waste”. This can assist practitioners to better cope with risks related to this waste and, therefore, better exploit the (limited) knowledge base available

Knowledge and Management Models for Sustainable Growth

In the last years sustainability has become a topic of global concern and a key issue in the strategic agenda of both business organizations and public authorities and organisations. Significant changes in business landscape, the emergence of new technology, including social media, the pressure of new social concerns, have called into question established conceptualizations of competitiveness, wealth creation and growth. New and unaddressed set of issues regarding how private and public organisations manage and invest their resources to create sustainable value have brought to light. In particular the increasing focus on environmental and social themes has suggested new dimensions to be taken into account in the value creation dynamics, both at organisations and communities level. For companies the need of integrating corporate social and environmental responsibility issues into strategy and daily business operations, pose profound challenges, which, in turn, involve numerous processes and complex decisions influenced by many stakeholders. Facing these challenges calls for the creation, use and exploitation of new knowledge as well as the development of proper management models, approaches and tools aimed to contribute to the development and realization of environmentally and socially sustainable business strategies and practices

Design of a collaborative information and communication technology platform to support creativity in innovation activities - prototyping and user experience test

This research project reports the results of the thesis, “Design of a Collaborative Information and Communication Technology Platform to support Creativity in Innovation Activities -Prototyping and User Experience Test” and provides details of the procedure followed in realizing the thesis. The research was conducted between Fall 2010 and Winter 2013. The research problem was based on an analysis of three challenges observed in innovation activities, especially at the level of creative collaboration among R&D enterprises and creative teams of “Les 24 heures de l’innovation”. These challenges must be overcome before the knowledge production and ideas sharing process can be improved. Three types of challenges were identified: - Communication: The communication of knowledge for innovation, which must be transmitted to successfully resolve complex issues, in the proposal of new products or new services - Organizational: Development of knowledge management strategies for distributed idea sharing, which should be encouraged by the organization to create or support teams by means of a collaborative platform - Technology: Transmission of tacit, unstructured, and informal knowledge, especially using collaborative ICT and technologies Web 2.0 or Web 3.0 tools. This thesis investigates two dimensions of the research problem: the theoretical and the practical (technology issues). The theoretical dimension examines the environment for the exchange of ideas and knowledge, which supports creative collaboration in distributed conditions. The practical and technological dimensions involve a creative collaboration model which will take the form of a platform for creative teams. The aim of this thesis is to support the creative teams in the process of conceptualization of a new innovation-oriented product. Through this thesis, we seek to: - Determine the needs of creative teams during the conceptualization stage of a new product; - Propose a Knowledge Management System (knowledge and tools) that enables the support of tacit knowledge produced in distributed condition of team members; - Modeling a Platform that supports internal creative team’s needs and the external context for innovation; - Propose the assessment of the creative collaboration meaning the user experience testing and the realized task by creative teams on the ICT prototype. We carry out a review of the literature in Chapter 1, a study of collaboration among creative R&D teams in Canada in Chapter 2, and in Chapter 4, we perform a knowledge needs analysis of creative teams in “Les 24 heures de l’innovation”. These will enable us to achieve the first objective, the definition of the needs for supporting creative teams. Ultimately, we characterize the context of R&D activities in Canada, as well as interactions among creative R&D teams for innovation, with a theoretical study, by analyzing statistical data obtained from Statistics Canada. A detailed presentation of the problem statement and the methodology used for this thesis is provided in Chapter 3. The second objective is fulfilled by analyzing the idea production process and the current ICTs, for proposing a conceptual model based on the observation of creative teams participating in “Les 24 heures de l’innovation” November 2011. On the other hand, by proposing the new specifications that support collaboration, we select a methodology based on the law of ideality (TRIZ), in which we observe the evolution of technological state-of-the-art of current functionalities (Chapter 5) in contrast with the needs and useful operations of ICT. To realize the third objective, we model the collaborative platform, and its primary functionalities are presented using the UML 2, Unified Modeling Language, also we describe the prototype deployment at Chapter 6. The fourth objective is reached by an experimental evaluation of the platform that is presented in Chapter 7 and in Chapter 8. These chapters summarize the results obtained by the application of the following user experience test: validation of UML use-cases user’s acceptance, the task analysis of the main used functionalities, the creative performance Analysis of user (PAN) and the usability test. Finally, the other sections of this document are the conclusion, findings, proposals for further research, and recommendations. In the Appendix, we include the ethical plan presented to the École de technologie supérieure Ethical Review Board, as well as the results obtained from “Les 24 heures de l’innovation” of May 2012