Knowledge Management How-to: Internal Simplicity, External Complexity
and Teams
at
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=10%2026%20PST&year=2003&public=1
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Cybercollegially,
Charles Wankel
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WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind., Jan. 7 (AScribe Newswire) -- A Purdue University
professor who started out doing a research project on instituting flow
manufacturing, ended up confronting issues of how companies change
essential processes and transfer important information within their
organizations.
There are many barriers to communicating new processes that lead
to a competitive advantage for a company.
"We learned that teams are key to gaining an advantage over the
competition to accomplish what is termed knowledge management," says
Thomas H. Brush, an associate professor of strategic management at the
Krannert School of Management.
At its most basic level, knowledge management in an organization
involves making sure individuals and departments have the informational
tools to do their jobs. At higher levels, the concept of knowledge
management ranges from transferring how to accomplish a complex task or
process in another part of a company, to maintaining, passing on and
expanding the intellectual capital of the organization.
"Knowledge management within an organization is a conundrum,"
Brush says. "The more you're sure you know a process in a company, the
more likely that your competitors know it. So you have to make your
processes simple enough for employees to understand and complex enough
so it's hard for your competitors to steal them."
Brush and his former student, Catherine A. Maritan, an assistant
professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, studied a
Fortune 250 industrial company's efforts to introduce flow manufacturing
into four different plants in four states. The company, dubbed
Industrial Products (IP), with 40,000 employees working in the United
States, Europe, Asia and Latin America, requested that its name not be
used in the research for competitive reasons. The research will be
published in an upcoming special issue of the Strategic Management
Journal.
In their paper, the researchers write that flow, or lean,
manufacturing "is a process-centered approach, pioneered by Japanese
automobile manufacturers, that organizes manufacturing around the
value-creating process used to produce a product instead of around
departments or functions."
Flow manufacturing is a fundamental change in philosophy that
cuts across all phases of production. Brush and Maritan write that flow
manufacturing is "particularly suited to assembly manufacturing
processes with large numbers of parts."
Flow manufactured products are often produced in small quantities
in response to orders instead of forecasts, with the goals of increasing
quality and reducing both parts and finished product inventories.
Brush and Maritan studied four of IP's plants - labeled Indiana,
Ohio, Illinois and Kentucky - manufacturing a variety of low-technology
building construction products using conventional fabrication and
assembly methods. The corporate office mandated the switch to flow
manufacturing, but each plant operated with its own profit and loss
responsibility. Because of the variety of products, each plant had
different goals in instituting flow manufacturing.
For Brush and Maritan, flow manufacturing was a substantive
enough change that it emerged as an appropriate case study in
understanding how an organization goes about communicating and putting
into effect a different method - and philosophy - of manufacturing
products.
Brush describes the process of knowledge transfer as "taking the
abstract, essential knowledge and customizing it at other plants making
different products."
Brush and Maritan write, "Our objective in the study was to
develop a descriptive process model of the transfer of a complex
manufacturing practice and identify if and how differences between
plants affect the transfer."
Key to the ultimate successful transfer of knowledge was the team
concept. IP initially used an in-house consulting team to study and
implement flow manufacturing throughout the company. The corporate team
established a consistent companywide definition and form of flow
manufacturing. At this point IP had the knowledge it needed to transfer,
and the knowledge management transfer began.
However, IP's initial attempts to complete the knowledge transfer
were exercises in Murphy's law, as problems surfaced both in the
production processes and among those who ran them. The Ohio management
team, for example, was so embedded in its non-flow manufacturing way of
doing things that management could not grasp that it was possible to
change its processes.
"What we began to realize was that even when a firm knows how to
do something, that's not enough," Brush says. "It was as difficult to
diffuse knowledge throughout the company as it was to develop it in the
first place, because each plant had different staffs, different goals
and there were tensions between the individual plants and the corporate
office and between staff and line people."
A number of managers from the Indiana plant received formal
training from an outside consulting firm. The Indiana plant moved ahead
of the other plants in the flow manufacturing implementation - though it
was a one-step forward, two-steps back process, Brush says. The signs of
improvement at the Indiana plant encouraged employing a corporate staff
team to diffuse the knowledge and capabilities developed at that plant
to the other IP facilities.
While the corporate team usually had a staff expert at the
plants, the challenges were sometimes too great for an individual staff
member or team to overcome. A "not-invented-here syndrome" often
overcame the initiatives put in place by the staff team. Instead, IP
moved toward a model that used a team from the Indiana plant as a
template.
When the next flow initiative had problems, IP sent a team of 10
Indiana plant employees - who, at this point, knew both the theory and
practice of applying flow manufacturing - to problem plants. Brush
describes the Indiana group as "a shock team" that worked face-to-face
with the personnel at the other problem plants to communicate the
abstract, essential and practical knowledge and apply it in the new
production environments. That satisfied the need for internal simplicity
side in Brush's knowledge-management conundrum.
The external complexity side of the conundrum was satisfied
because the exchange was team based, specific and dynamic, meaning the
competition would have a difficult time replicating the
knowledge-management model IP had created. And IP had a huge head start
over the competition, particularly small companies, in implementing flow
manufacturing. So Brush and Maritan suggest that IP's industry will
undergo consolidation.
Support for the research came from the Dauch Center for the
Management of Manufacturing Enterprises at the Krannert School of
Management.