Knowledge management and various forms of networking have become prevailing practices among modern manufacturing organisations. While flexible management of operative knowledge within an organisation has proven a challenge, sharing of knowledge between organisations, not to mention collaborative creation of new knowledge is even more so.
What is more, current knowledge management discussion has ignored the end users of the knowledge managed. While publications are filled with lofty organisational diagrams, the everyday hurdles faced by the authors and users of the knowledge are not addressed.
The authors and users of operative knowledge are spread out accross a temporal network that involves several different parties from design to disassembly. While the physical life of a product covers only a portion of the network, knowledge has to be managed throughout it. The repairman fixing the product should be supported to collect his or her experiences for the designer of the product. The designer should be able to provide performance support for the people who disassemble the product.
In this presentation I will discuss the role of knowledge from the perspective of an operative shop-floor organisation. The cases are from light-weight assembly industry and multimedia based task support systems (outwardly similar to an EPSS) used to facilitate creation and application of task related knowledge.