Dynamic Knowledge Management (KM) is a combination of cultural and technological factors, including the cultural factors of people and their motivations, technological factors of content and infrastructure and, where these both come together, interface factors. In this paper a Dynamic KM framework is described in the context of employees being motivated to create profit for their company through product development in high value manufacturing. It is reported how the framework was discussed during a meeting of the collaborating company's (BAE Systems) project stakeholders. Participants agreed the framework would have most benefit at the start of the product lifecycle before key decisions were made. The framework has been designed to support organisational learning and to reward employees that improve the position of the company in the market place.
Abstract-Employee collaboration and knowledge sharing is vital for manufacturing organisations wishing to be successful in an ever-changing global market place; Product Development (PD) teams, in particular, rely heavily on these activities to generate innovative designs and enhancements to existing product ranges. To this end, the purpose of this paper is to present the results of a validation study carried out during an Engineering Education Scheme project to confirm the benefits of using bespoke Web 2.0-based groupware to improve collaboration and knowledge sharing between dispersed PD teams. The results of a cross-sectional survey concluded that employees would welcome greater usage of social computing technologies. The study confirmed that groupware offers the potential to deliver a more effective collaborative and knowledge sharing environment with additional communication channels on offer. Furthermore, a series of recommended guidelines are presented to show how PD teams, operating in globallydispersed organisations, may use Web 2.0 tools to improve employee collaboration and knowledge sharing.
The UK Government considers its Aerospace Industry a remarkable success story, enjoying a global market share of 17% in 2015. The capture, management and sharing of employee knowledge is seen as vital if the industry is to remain highly innovative and retain its pre-eminent position internationally.Aerospace manufacturers, such as BAE Systems, often have to re-engineer business processes routinely to ensure their survival. Knowledge sharing in the industry is seen as challenging due to the dispersed nature of its operations and multi-tier supply chains. This paper, through a five-year participantobservation study at the World's second largest aerospace and defence organisation, BAE Systems, proposes a new paradigm for virtual knowledge sharing in dispersed aerospace product development based on emergent social software platforms such as Enterprise 2.0 technologies. The developed framework and methodologies are applied to the bespoke BAE Systems' engineering lifecycle process to validate its effectiveness with results indicating that Enterprise 2.0 technologies offer a more openlyinnovative environment in which employees may share and interact with knowledge more effectively and easily across geographical and functional boundaries, compared with conventional engineering information systems.
Abstract-Today, the manufacturing industry is under pressure to be able to rapidly come up with innovative designs and produce them in much shorter timeframes in order to keep up with growing customer demands and quickly gain new business. One of the ways used to achieve shorter time to markets for new product developments is by using design for manufacturing (DFM) methods to reduce time and energy going into resolving manufacturing based defects. It is also more vital in today's manufacturing industry to make use of DFM methods much earlier in the product development lifecycle in order to prevent potentially known quality defects from happening and save on costs associated with late design changes. This requires enabling a more systemic feedback cycle of production data for the creation of DFM knowledge repositories as well as overcoming some wider knowledge sharing barriers across the organization. This investigation focuses on how the communications of manufacturing knowledge from production data is affected by factors within the overall organization. The investigation is one of the few that consider the influence of organizational factors on the communication of engineering knowledge as well as the related knowledge sharing barriers. The project is carried out empirically with a large UK based aerospace manufacturing company by gathering data primarily from observations and interviews. This paper presents the findings followed by discussions for improving DFM Knowledge Management in the aerospace industry.
The aim of adopting Product Lifecycle Management in a highly product centric knowledge environment is to reduce product development time and costs whilst improving quality through integrating people, processes, resources and information effectively. In the aerospace industry, most products and systems are manufactured, delivered to customers and serviced over an extensively long time, typically 20 years or more. This results in the build-up of large amounts of dispersed data and information related to defects throughout the different product's lifecycle stages, hence inhibiting the ability to make effective use of defect data to improve design for manufacturing (DFM) implementation. There have been very limited research efforts aiming to overcome these challenges in the low volume high value aerospace manufacturing context. This paper presents the findings of an extensive industrial investigation carried out at BAE Systems (Rochester, UK) to identify the gaps and requirements in the industrial practice and proposes the need for a structured approach to defect data management in order to establish the systematic link between the defects, engineering data, and related issues within PLM System context.
Abstract:Organisations need to overcome a number of challenges, including improving knowledge management, to ensure competitiveness in today's global business environment. Product development and engineering design decisions are typically based on the knowledge available within enterprises. An ability to quickly discover and capture this knowledge and communicate with colleagues is required to enable effective outputs. An in-depth industry investigation, conducted within a leading manufacturing organisation in the Aerospace and Defence Industry (ADI), confirmed that knowledge management is only average. Employees would welcome the introduction of new technology to improve knowledge sharing and feel competent to use Web 2.0 and social media technologies. Based on the investigation, an interactive groupware prototype employing collaborative Web 2.0 technologies has been proposed. The prototype will be introduced as a case study to engineers within the collaborating company during product development projects with benefits in productivity and collaborative practices being assessed.
Defects generated by the UK supply chain is much higher than its global competitors. Defects impact costs and production throughput due to unpredictable disruptions resulting in many non-value adding activities. However, defects data associated knowledge have rarely been considered and implemented as the manufacturing capability in existing design for manufacturing and assembly (DFMA) data/knowledge bases. On the other hand, current ICT systems used in the aerospace industry are not flexible enough to keep up with the new requirements of collaborating to manage knowledge properly, and the use of real-time manufacturing data generated in manufacturing activities. This research was carried out in collaboration with one of the UK’s largest aerospace companies in order to analyse the complexity of design and manufacturing activities of high-value safety-critical aerospace products. The results of the work are presented, and a novel approach and system was developed, that can be used to support DFMA using defects knowledge. The approach was implemented as a knowledge management system using collaborative design principles. Key findings from the main contribution in the context of extended enterprises of high value low volume safety critical product manufacturing are discussed.
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