know-ledge management

Technologies such as Digital Mock Up (DMU) or Virtual Reality (VR) help to expose and fix design errors at an early stage in the product development process. Nevertheless the discovery of these potential problems is still a common obstacle. The approach introduced within this paper improves the existing virtual product validation method by using the company’s existing knowledge of former projects. The DMU-Cockpit integrates the usually spread experience of known errors in one tool by modelling a relation between classified components and sources of error in a matrix. This allows the automatic selection of potential sources of error for a chosen part and derives the most valuable validation tasks of the knowledge base.

The growing importance of knowledge in product development processes is followed by the urgent need to manage the quality of implemented knowledge management strategies in the process. All sorts of companies have been implementing knowledge management activities in their daily routines, either or not they are aware of it. This paper introduces a model to measure the maturity level of knowledge intensive business processes, which is adjusted to the needs of small and medium enterprises (SME). A set of success factors and their indicators were developed to help identifying the as-is process situation and plan improvement measures as well as a web-based self-assessment tool.