The strategic value of targeted knowledge management - case study of an Australian refrigeration company

This thesis is a study of design and implementation of an engineering knowledge management system to facilitate knowledge capture, sharing and reuse to both ensure business continuity and resolve a make-span problem in an Australian refrigeration company. The company had encountered problems with a number of engineering staff in the small product development team leaving the company and taking their expertise with them. This situation has impacted the business continuity of the company, because the knowledge and expertise used in the refrigerated display cabinet development process is a combination of explicit and tacit knowledge as the engineers conduct the product development process intuitively. Records of previous design and testing processes were either non-existent or stored in ways that were not accessible. The other business problem in the company resulted from product development taking too long, in effect from 6 weeks up to the worst case of one year. The company needed research solutions to both of these problems to strategically maintain the competitiveness of the company business. This research applied a single case study research method with a problem-solving paradigm, Design Science methodology, to develop and then test solutions. Design Science as a research methodology has two components, first design development and second, design evaluation. The researcher developed an engineering knowledge based system as an artefact to solve the problem of enabling company business continuity. Using ontology as a structural base, the KBS contains both knowledge elements captured from the engineers during the data collection process and existing knowledge artefacts in the company. The research used a set of multilayered research techniques, including semi-formal and formal interviews, serendipitous interviews, group meetings, observation and shadowing, to capture and then structure both the tacit and explicit knowledge. The resultant ontology was used to build the KBS to store both tacit and explicit knowledge and answer the engineers’ questions about their existing and previous product development processes. The KBS developed in this research is a knowledge repository to maintain records of the products design and testing processes in a searchable form. Use and then an evaluation of the system by the engineers and the executive staff of the company confirmed that the intention of the system to address the business continuity problem by knowledge capture, classification and storage was achieved and met the company’s business needs. This research also applied Heuristic Process Mining to the knowledge stored in the KBS to address the second problem identified initially by the company, that of lengthy make span in new product design and development. HPM is a technique using mathematical models to find relationships between tasks in the process. HMP measures dependency and frequency values between tasks and tasks with low D/F value can be eliminated from the process. This then can lead to the shorter product testing process. The research showed that the application of HPM to the stored process knowledge in the KMS was able to significantly reduce the product design and testing process in the company