The rebirth of knowledge management
Information explosion has companies seeking better collaboration tools
By Hope Neal, contributing editor -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 10/1/2006 12:00:00 AM
Knowledge may be power, but the ability to manage knowledge—or more precisely, corporate information—definitely is money. That's money saved and money earned.
Recognition of that fact is fueling an upsurge in spending on knowledge-management solutions. Boston-based AMR Research uncovered the trend in a recent survey of 400 IT executives employed by manufacturing and services companies.
Companies in these sectors already spend 50 percent to 60 percent of their IT application budgets on information management, and they plan to spend an average 7.6-percent more on knowledge-management software in 2006.
Knowledge-management solutions—sometimes referred to as content-management or document-management applications—generally organize data related to business functions in a central repository. The data repository typically is linked to a set of workflow applications that allow groups of workers to participate in collaborative business processes.
For a time it may have seemed as if the concept of knowledge management had all but disappeared. That's partly because these solutions can support such a broad range of business processes—from product development to customer service. That said, many vendors decided to concentrate on a single set of processes.
Jim Murphy, a director with AMR, says some vendors may have scared off potential customers by overselling the solutions' capabilities.
“There was a lot of overly aggressive technology out there for a while that said, 'We help capture the knowledge that's in people's heads,'” he says. “That sounds a little Big Brotherish. The idea is to be able to identify who knows what.”
Merging approaches
Users' renewed interest in knowledge management is catching the attention of even the largest technology suppliers. And because knowledge management can encompass multiple technologies—from email to instant messaging, portals, search tools, and records management—each vendor is taking a different approach.
For instance, Murphy notes, SAP is making an enterprise portal the centerpiece of its knowledge-management strategy, while Microsoft, the No. 1 supplier of office-productivity tools, is focusing its knowledge-management efforts on the desktop.
Even with these different starting points, knowledge-management technologies are merging. Vendors are combining multiple forms of knowledge-management technologies into single product suites in response to users' desire to work with fewer suppliers.
Product development—which in most manufacturing companies involves collaboration among teams of engineering, procurement, and production personnel located at multiple facilities—is a process that cries out for comprehensive knowledge management solutions. And vendors like PTC, a leading supplier of product design software, answered the call.
“Companies have tools that don't necessarily talk together coming at them from many vendors, and they have to cobble these things together while making a business out of taking an idea on one side and delivering a product on the other side,” says Tom Shoemaker, a PTC VP.
PTC initiated the move to 3D product design technology with the introduction of its Pro/ENGINEER CAD package in the early 1990s. The larger files generated by 3D CAD tools contributed to the data explosion that is causing companies to seek knowledge-management solutions. PTC's initial answer was to acquire a company called Computerware with product data-management application called Windchill.
“Windchill is basically a repository accessed via the Web that represents a single source of truth for all product-related content,” says Shoemaker. While Windchill was originally designed to manage data created in any CAD tool, PTC fine-tuned the application to work seamlessly with Pro/ENGINEER, making it attractive to users of that application.
PLM complete
Marc-André Verville, CAD administrator at Venmar Ventilation, a manufacturer of indoor air-quality products for commercial and residential applications, says the Canadian company chose Windchill to manage product-development data in part because, together with Pro/ENGINEER, it gave Venmar a complete product life-cycle management (PLM) system.
The company's search for a PLM solution began as it struggled to handle files generated by multiple product development teams dispersed across five locations. “We were looking for new CAD software and at the same time a new CAD vault, because we faced a lot of problems. Then we heard about PLM solutions,” says Verville.
Venmar first implemented Windchill with Pro/ENGINEER in 2003, and has since upgraded to Windchill 8.0. Before the deployment, product-development teams saved design files in shared folders on a server. File overwrites happened all too often, making it difficult for the company to track design revisions. “It was sometimes painful to find information about a product,” Verville says.
With Windchill managing all its product data, Venmar reduced product time-to-market from 24 months to 18 months, with the hope of cutting that to 12 months by next year. In part, the product helps to achieve this by automating workflow for drawing approvals, and ensuring that documents cannot be overwritten, making it easier to track revisions.
“It helps us keep information all in one place,” Verville says, adding, “It's easier to perform simultaneous engineering.”
Booking the financial benefit
Streamlining product development processes as Venmar has done is more important than ever to manufacturers, claims Shoemaker. “There's so much financial benefit locked in product-development processes. If companies focus on doing that really well, they stand to gain.”
In fact, improving processes throughout the business is becoming more of a selling point for knowledge-management solutions. Renee Thomas, director of field marketing for Esker, a business document-delivery solutions provider, says even though many manufacturers have invested heavily in ERP systems to automate operations, “It's amazing to come into companies and see just how manual many processes there are.”
Thomas points to invoicing as an example of how paper still bridges the gaps in some manufacturers' ERP systems. “Jobs are managed on automated ERP systems, and then the invoices have to be issued,” she says. “Those invoices need to go outside the company, and in a lot of cases, they're actually printing those documents and then delivering them either by mail or fax.”
Esker's document-delivery automation offering, called DeliveryWare, addresses this slowdown. The solution hooks into the user's ERP system and enables it to automatically send and receive purchase orders, invoices, and account statements that previously needed to be printed or scanned.
While a majority of Esker's customers use the product to complement their SAP systems, the company also supports integration with other ERP solutions.
“We look for areas of the organization where there's paper piling up on a printer that needs to be disseminated in some way—whether internally or externally.”
Esker isn't the only knowledge-management vendor to espouse the “paper-is-bad” theory. Cabinet NG has a similar philosophy.
“Documents are probably one of the strongest—yet unnoticed—threats to a manufacturer,” says James True, VP of business development for Cabinet NG, which puts a new twist on the historical approach to document management.
Cabinet NG adopted the filing cabinet structure typically used to handle paper to create the user interface for its flagship product, CNG-SAFE—which stands for Cabinet NG Shared Access Filing Environment.
Off the wall
“We've found that people resist change,” True says. “Their entire lives, they've been brought up with this notion of a file cabinet, folders within the file cabinet, and documents within that folder. So we designed our user interface exactly to that metaphor. A system is worthless if users aren't comfortable using it.”
The filing cabinet metaphor seems ideal for Mooresville, N.C.-based machine tool maker Weinig USA, which replaced a wall of cabinets with Cabinet NG's CNG-SAFE document-management system.
Weinig USA has more 10,000 machines in the field, and must keep files on each of them up to date. The sheer number of these files—along with the number of people requiring access to them—drove Weinig to search for a knowledge-management system, says Dennis Hargan, IT manager.
Often, several people would need to access the same file at the same time, Hargan says. “One person would pull it and somebody else would want it, and when they put the file back, it would get misfiled. It was an ongoing situation where one person was constantly trying to find the missing files.”
Now that the files are in electronic filing cabinets, thanks to CNG-SAFE, several Weinig USA employees can enjoy simultaneous file access. While the company used to scan in many of its documents to create the electronic files, it now uses CNG-SAFE to electronically create new folders when a new machine is built.
The software also automatically routes documents—whether scanned in, received via fax or email, or generated internally—to the appropriate cabinet and folder. This includes service reports that are sent in by the company's service technicians.
Field work
To file reports from the field, Weinig technicians use laptops that include signature pads for customers to sign off on the reports. The reports are then emailed to a specific email address where they are scanned by the software for the serial number of the machine that was serviced. That information allows the system to then file the report in the appropriate folder.
“We no longer have a person taking all the reports as they come in and manually filing them in a cabinet,” says Hargan.
The ability of the software to extract the machine's serial number from the service report was functionality Weinig USA added to the Cabinet NG solution. And like many of the companies surveyed by AMR for its knowledge-management study, Weinig USA plans on expanding its own knowledge-management system deployment.
Currently, Weinig USA is working with Cabinet NG to automate the hand-off of files from the sales department to the order-processing and accounting departments when a sale is made. With this new workflow, a quote will become the foundation for a customer's order, while also triggering accounts-receivable processes.
Even as it looks to continue expanding its use, Hargan says the Cabinet NG application already is an indispensable part of Weinig's operations.
Apparently a lot of manufacturers are starting to think about knowledge-management that way.
