Training

Knowledge Management is for many projects a future target whereby the potential of using KM during the project is unfortunately neglected. This starts with the project teams who know nothing about each other and continues with the way in which knowledge management concepts are designed: “in private”. The article describes connections between process optimisation, enterprise culture and knowledge management as well as the “KM²” procedure in the joint project WISMA, where the acceptance for changes and authentic handling during the project is the focal point right from the beginning.

This market survey gives an overview on software for the support of knowledge management. The survey overlooks the span from specialized search engines to integrated knowledge management systems with a broad range of functions. The investigated software supports community-oriented approaches as well as information retrieval. Usage possibilities are as different as the heterogenous requirements of enterprises and organizations for knowledge management. Therefore a direct comparison between the investigated tools is not useful.

To an increasing degree process stability and documentation gain in importance on manual workstations because of the demand to lot size 1 and the duty of flexibility. To ensure efficiency increase regarding to harder quality guidelines, the flow of information to the worker and back have to be optimised and realised resistant against failures and information loss. The use of multi-medial, IT-based worker information systems to assist workers conducting their tasks and to enable a backflow of relevant information like quality data, waste quantities etc. with current technical methods offers a possible solution.

Turbulent business environments force enterprises to ever faster answers and adaptions in order to secure their competitive ability. Mutability and responseability as crucial success factors are based finally on knowledge, which must be continuously improved and renewed. The article shows starting points and how ontology based knowledge management can be used purposefully for the increase of the mutability in and by enterprises and in particular in the assembly.

Although medium sized enterprises ascribe high importance to knowledge management and its impact on company’s success, they have rarely undertaken steps to introduce respective methods. Only a small share of companies applies selected methods, usually rather sporadic and without connection to corporate strategy or other management techniques. The reason lies in the lack of a tool for choosing the most suitable methods. Out of the multitude of instruments available for knowledge management, it is difficult to decide about a method mix fitting best to respective business processes, initial situation and specific demands of the company. This paper presents a concept to manage these shortcomings.

Organizational Learning offers a good possibility for enterprises to compete with the dynamics of the market. Under certain conditions, process integrated education not only leads to process optimization in firms, but also to the beginning of organizational learning. This is of great importance particularly to small and medium sized enterprises, since they normally lack appropriate structures.

The internet-based teaching, learning and communication system “Business Administration Knowledge Laboratory” (WiLabBW) is developed and continuously expanded within a cooperation project of Thuringian universities. The paper gives a survey of the basic goals and explains its architecture and business model.

An intensive co-operation and data exchange between members of different disciplines are necessary in planning, conception and development of production plants and processes. Planning failures that are identified too late or different understanding of contents can lead to significant effects, e.g. during starting or ramp-up. In the context of the Digital Factory the Fraunhofer IPA develops organizational and technological solutions for co-operative planning on the base of workflow and knowledge management as well as solutions for interaction, data and tool integration. The aim is the optimisation of planning quality and planning costs.

In the face of constantly changing market conditions and the associated product and technology changes the available personnel structures must be considered in particular during the further development of manufacturing sys-tems. Experiences from operational practice show that personnel development measures are usually reactive and are often carried out in an improvised, ad-hoc manner. In order to counteract such reactive measures, the technology calendar, with which a timely and targeted personnel development planning can be initiated, is presented.

Changeable enterprises are sustainably focussing market and technology changes ranging from a short term up to long term view to maintain market success under changing market and environment conditions. The specific addressing of competence development can provide a significant contribution to changeable conditions. For these both, adaptive reactions to present changes as well as preventative planning addressing future changes are needed. To support the changeability of an enterprise holistic competence management approaches can be used. They allow to match supply and demand of competence and to design corresponding concepts for competence development.