A System of Knowledge Briefs to Support Decision-Making and Knowledge Reuse in Product Development

As commercial product development companies start to apply Systems Engineering principles into more processes there are increasing process interfaces and competing paradigms to address. The combined Agile and Lean Systems Engineering-processes make it more suitable for applications in the commercial sector, such as the automotive industry. The combination is used to meetthe increasing demands of higher performance with shorter development cycles, and increased quality in products, along with reduced cost. This paper renders an exploratory research within a product development company. Investigating challenges with their approach and structure of knowledge based development, including the implementation of a lean system of Knowledge Briefs, also known as A3 reports. The system is implemented to support the process of identifying the root cause of a problem, creating new knowledge, capturing the knowledge, and disseminating the knowledge in order to foster effective reuse in multidisciplinary product development. To identify current challenges, literature on knowledge management has been studied, along with analysis of the company’s theoretical and practical process of knowledge management. The research identified multiple challenges towards successful knowledge reuse within the company’s current process and structure, specifically addressing the lost potential for knowledge reuse through the lack of awareness through the Communities of Practice (COP) and the K-briefs focus on knowledge capture. The challenges assist in the mapping of unused potential of knowledge based development and when defining the path for future initiatives