Workplace Knowledge System

Context & Aim

The Workplace Knowledge System or WKS supports first time right manufacturing, enabling tacit knowledge sharing across enterprises to reduce variability and increase productivity. WKS brings many concepts from the social media and consumer environment and blends these with features and specifications from industry to facilitate capture and share of tacit knowledge in a robust and secure enterprise solution. WKS uses powerful AI recommender systems to identify and connect colleagues to the optimal knowledge they need to do their task, immediately, at point of use.

Challenge

Studies have shown explicit knowledge only makes up 30% of knowledge within the industrial environment. You can teach a person to maintain a set of machines but only their experience will make them good at it. Tacit knowledge is an engineer’s experience, their know-how. Tacit knowledge is the tricks of the trade, the little touches that make a good team great and is passed between individuals verbally, if passed at all. By not catering for the tacit knowledge in your organization, you are in danger of introducing organisational inefficiencies and risks, including knowledge loss, longer and more expensive process transfers and weaker performance.

Solution

The Workplace Knowledge System provides a user friendly, peer-to-peer platform and experience for the sharing of tacit knowledge, Know How, Know Now® with robust security and enterprise grade integration capabilities; improving factory KPIs such as productivity, process transfer times, training performance and equipment uptime. Workplace Knowledge System ensures that the information of interest to the engineer or technician comes from them and pushed to their colleagues.

Testimonial

“As one of the founding members of ICMR, now part of the Advanced Manufacturing Ireland initiative, Pfizer has been instrumental in helping shape and inform the research themes and in particular has played a key role in informing and piloting solutions to maintain this leading workforce performance through the Tacit Knowledge research program. At the Grangecastle biopharmaceutical manufacturing site, we have piloted the Workplace Knowledge System, a user-focused platform for the sharing of tacit and formal knowledge in an enterprise environment. Results to date have been exceedingly positive in terms of both user feedback and impacts on Key Performance Indicators through faster and easier access to knowledge” (Pat Field, Network Performance Leader, Pfizer).