Training

Knowledge Management has become one of the most recognized management concepts in the last decade. Knowledge is the critical success factor to sustain the competitive ability in companies but changes rapidly in today’s dynamic business environment. Therefore, companies are obliged to foster the knowledge transfer and development. “Community of Practice” is a team-building method to support the efficient use, communication and creation of knowledge in industrial and manufacturing enterprises.

Knowledge as a resource for business value creation became an increased importance during the last years. Industries are mainly influenced, which value creation is basing for the most part on the acquisition, generation and usage of knowledge. Known tools for business process modelling only consider explicit knowledge which is represented in a formal manner. There is no focus on person-related knowledge that is not mainly used for information processing. KMDL allows the modelling and analysis of knowledge intensive business processes like software engineering, mechanical design or technical sales and basing on this the planning of knowledge management systems and their integration into a firm.

The changing market situation due to growing globalisation, the development of new technologies, as well as the strong competition forces today’s enterprises to employ innovative strategies in order to maintain their competitiveness on national and international markets. Many companies respond to this challenges establishing cross national co-operations. This policy is also applied in the field of product development. Nevertheless it becomes clear that many problems of a product development between distant located collaboration partners are based on cultural differences. Hence balancing and adjusting cultural differences is of pivotal impor-tance for the success of the project type.

Management literature reports on the trend for large companies to adopt the principles of the “learning organisation” or “lifelong learning”. They found “corporate universities” for educating their own staff, which are commonly based on computer-based or web-based educational services. The virtual institute VIMIMS offers an approach that is de-signed to offer small and medium enterprises access to up-to-date knowledge on production management without their having to invest substantial sums in internal further education programmes.

More and more companies optimise their further education by e-learning. Advanced multimedia technologies simplify the compilation of comprehensive texts and audio-visual materials into learning content management sys-tems. Certain aspects of law, in particular copyright law, need to be observed from the developing to the final project phase. Infringement of the respective law may result in compensation of damages or even suspension of the e-learning training. Hereafter are set out some relevant legal aspects one has to consider in order to create a legally tes-ted learning content management system.

For an innovative and efficient product development process the use of modern parametric 3D-CAD systems is of increa-sing importance. Basically in the internal digital data structure of a 3D-CAD model geometrical and topological data as well as the modelling history is being stored. Additionally, the feature technology enables the models to be developed with the help of defined zones of geometry with embedded se-mantics. By means of the integration of geometrical and non-geometrical information into the 3D-CAD models it is possible to embed product specific knowledge and design know-how into the models. The department of Computer Integrated Design (DIK) is investigating methods and tools for developing, managing and reusing knowledge-based 3D-CAD-models.

Knowledge as strategic resource becomes even more important now than in the past, because of the turbulent change experienced by a company and its operating environment. Therefore, innovative service companies attempt to bundle the existing knowledge in the company and to use it optimal. Through the accumulation of know-ledge, competencies arise which the competitor has difficulties imitating and which create a competitive advantage. The learning history method can now help to recover implicit knowledge in the company, to improve processes and to strengthen the service competence.