1. Many operations already have systems in place to manage their tangible knowledge; that’s reports, presentations, papers etc. However, they often overlook the knowledge and experience of their people.
2. A highly skilled and knowledgeable workforce is often a company’s most valuable and unique asset, so shouldn’t something be done something to safeguard this knowledge as well?
3. But effective knowledge management is often easier said than done – and this fact has been detrimental to the progress of many organizations. This is especially true for those in manufacturing industries, including general manufacturing, information technology, telecoms, chemicals and consumer goods.
4. In such companies, an aging workforce and largely manual processes have inhibited the effective transfer of knowledge and caused a massive skills gap to emerge. And this has hobbled one of the greatest economic drivers in the U.S.
5. Here’s how to implement knowledge management in industries across the board to close the skills gap, save money and bring your organization into the future.
UNTAPPED KNOWLEDGE
1. Most people appreciate that talented process operators often know most about running a process successfully.
2. There may even be ‘black art’ tricks that may not be in the Standard Operating Procedures, but which they need to do in order to process particularly difficult products.
3. Does only one shift know about this? Has anyone written any of it down? Is there a better way of running the process? There may be a rich seam of knowledge in your company that you’re just not exploiting.
4. Do you know what you don’t know? This is a question we rarely ask ourselves. However, once you know where your knowledge gaps are, you can work on filling them to gain competitive advantage.
5. On a practical note, if you manage your knowledge effectively it makes using it simple and easy. Furthermore, having it all available in one place makes training more efficient.
THE GROWING SKILLS GAP
1. Concerns around knowledge sharing remain prevalent in organizations trying to utilize analytics, dashboards and data-driven insights today. And on top of this, today’s manufacturing organizations must quickly contend with the growing skills gap because:
2. Boomers, a generation that makes up 25% of the manufacturing workforce, are aging out – and they’re taking the wealth of information and expertise they have with them. The biggest problem here is that the information they have is neither digitize nor documented, which means that their knowledge is unscalable, usable and not preserved once they’re gone.
3. Younger generations that are not as interested in manufacturing jobs, and they would rather work somewhere where they have access to multiple digital touch points. Plus, this generation has poor training: classroom lessons are easily forgotten, and on-the-job training can bring scheduling concerns and interrupt operations.
4. New technology requires really skilled training that incoming employees just don’t have. In fact, a Deloitte study reveals that the skills gap may leave an estimated 2.4 million positions unfilled between 2018 and 2028, with a potential economic impact of $2.5 trillion. Further, the study shows that the positions relating to digital talent, skilled production and operational managers may be three times as difficult to fill in the next three years.
5. What comprehensive knowledge management efforts should include?
CONTENT MANAGEMENT
1. A content management system will make an organization’s important information readily available through dashboards, portals and collaborative systems. To get this right, it’s important to:
- Have all of your internal data online or easily accessible in a centralized system.
- Incorporate relevant or useful external information. Keep in mind that key knowledge is often spread throughout your supply chain among suppliers, partners and customers. All of these relationships – and the information therein – should then be considered in content management efforts.
- Make sure that your team can effectively search this information and the web.
- Ensure that your data is arranged, organized and described in a way that’s easily discoverable by key personnel. Here, data analytics and machine learning are a huge help, but you still need the right human guidance and training to make it work.
2. If you can, you’ll want to incorporate information from your retiring skilled workers and make sure that they are involved in discussions and easily located through your expertise locator system.
3. Here, it’s important to remember that the old adage, “If you build it, they will come,” does not apply here. If your people are not on board, any kind of knowledge system simply won’t work. To this end, it’s important that your dashboards and tools are user-friendly and intuitive.
4. It’s also important that you improve your training and onboarding to improve recruiting, lessen the severity of the skills gap and ensure that your entire team can actually use your systems.
5. To ensure this, you can digitize instructions or take advantage of digital tools like augmented reality to improve training and attract digital native top talent. That way, your people will actually use your dashboards and your content management systems will actually work.
EXPERTISE LOCATION
1. Keep in mind that, when it comes to knowledge acquisition, there is nothing better than talking to an expert. You want to make it as easy as possible to find those experts in your network.
2. That’s where an expertise locator comes in: a system that helps you identify and locate experts quickly and efficiently.
3. It’s essentially a digitized “Yellow Pages” for all of the experts in your network. You can populate your expertise locator using:
- Employee resumes
- Algorithmic analysis of electronic communication like emails and social media posts
- Employee self-identification using a form online
LESSONS LEARNED
1. A lessons learned database is essentially an encyclopedia of best practices or, more informally, a great big book of here’s the mistakes we made and how to avoid them.
2. This is where you can really compile the tacit, on-the-job knowledge that your workers won’t find formally in a handbook or in a classroom.
3. To compile this database, your employees need to immediately debrief and share their information after an activity or job. Without this kind of follow-through, the “lessons learned” section will be impossible to compile.
COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE
1. Communities of practice (CoPs), as the name suggests, are groups that come together within a community to discuss problems, best practices, stories and lessons learned. These communities build upon the social nature of knowledge dissemination, which is extremely important in organizations.
2. Think about how much you learn around the water cooler – well, you should make sure that you have the opportunity for that kind of collaborative collision across buildings and even countries.
3. In other words, you need to take your CoPs virtual to electronically link your communities and make sure that your organization is on the same page. This requires that you fill critical roles, including a CoP manager, a moderator and a thought leader.
4. To figure out exactly what your CoP team will look like, ask yourself:
- Who will fill the roles of manager, moderator and thought leader?
- Who will have overall responsibility for coordinating and overseeing your various CoPs if you have more than one?
- Who will update members or take the CoP offline if it’s not serving a true purpose?
- How is the CoP kept fresh and current?
- When and how (under what rules) are items removed from the CoP database?
- How are those items archived?
- How are the CoP files made retrievable?
PRACTICAL SOLUTION TO KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
1. A K-Map provides a rigorous, structured and repeatable approach. What’s more, we developed it specifically for manufacturing companies, so it’s a practical solution that delivers real value.
2. Several large aluminium companies already use K-Maps. Therefore, we know our approach works.
3. The K-Map is simply a matrix. It provides an overview of the relationships between the quality attributes of the product and the process stages.
4. The axis at the top shows the process stages and the axis on the left lists the product attributes. The squares in the matrix show where a process stage affects a product attribute.
5. The K-Map uses colour to show the importance of each interaction. It can be Strong, Medium or Weak. There are also colours for Unknown or Disputed.
6. There are two ways to embark on a K-Map project. You can build a NEW one or you can buy an EXISTING K-Map. A new K-Map is when we work with you to build a K-Map from scratch via a facilitated workshop.
7. On the other hand, an existing K-Map is for companies that are new to making a particular product. It incorporates some of Innoval’s knowledge in the Summary Levels. This way you can establish a knowledge ‘baseline’. Consequently, by having this knowledge available to everyone, we hope the learning curve for your team will be shorter.
BENEFITS OF A KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
1. Now you may be wondering why should I go through all this effort to get these systems going? Well, knowledge management leads to:
2. Improved communication: KM allows for successful research and communication between departments and individuals, which in turn can increase productivity and effectiveness.
3. Situational awareness: With KM, organizations can establish great situational awareness, which can ultimately improve decision-making.
4. Decreased unallocated costs: If your data is strong, you can really see where your costs are skyrocketing or where your team if functioning inefficiently. You can then decrease those costs over time.
5. A better, data-driven system design: If your systems are run by comprehensive data and actionable information, every part of your company will run more effectively.
6. More effective decision analysis: Better information leads to better decisions – simple as that.
7. Robust systems: Effective knowledge management is a prerequisite for a robust enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), or enterprise content management (ECM) systems.
Source:
https://www.innovaltec.com/knowledge-management-blog/
https://www.accruent.com/resources/blog-posts/what-knowledge-management-why-it-important-closing-skills-gap
