By now, most companies have been able to stitch together their various applications, either through Web services, custom-built add-ons or commercial integration technology that many of the vendors began offering a few years ago. The missing link, according to many end users, has been an intuitive user interface.

When complex manufacturers were surveyed and asked about the biggest enterprise application challenges they faced which resulted in loss of time or wasted resources, they inevitably responded with one of two issues:

1. Loss of time and resources due to the need to search through complex navigation structures to find required information/data/functions
2. The need to learn an ever-growing number of modules/applications/functions all with totally diverse navigational structures and conventions.

It is clear that the need for a usable Enterprise Integration software that can integrate with numerous systems, databases and tools is essential for a complex manufacturer in order to cut down on time loss and increase productivity. If your knowledge management applications and product configurators are not properly integrated in way that your power sellers and front office staff can actually use, intuitively, than you are losing the ability to draw upon your existing knowledge base and expert-knowledge, leading to incorrect and inaccurate quotes and orders.

Cincom’s Enterprise Integration for Complex Manufacturers addresses the need for a powerful quote-to-order solution integrated within the existing Enterprise landscape. A seamless integration that provides powerful tools with effective quote management capabilities, product and sales configuration functionality and, above all, an intuitive interface that your sales teams and front office staff will actually use.

Cincom’s Socrates product is a complete, enterprise-strength application development environment. Socrates allows knowledge-based applications to be developed accurately and deployed rapidly. This is essential in environments currently housed in old legacy systems without proper integration. The ability to accurately capture whole-system knowledge bases and that quickly deploy the finished knowledge base has long been a weak point for corporations who must survive that transition.

Expert Knowledge and Business Rules

Knowledge-based applications are driven by business rules, as opposed to conventional programming logic. Business rules define the processes, procedures, and policies that run your business, but in order to be fully efficient, business rules technology must include the capability of changing, often rapidly, in response to new customer environments, business-centric regulations and state and federal mandates.

Business Rules can also be expanded to include the expert knowledge that has until now been stored only within the minds of your most valued people. Business rules and decision engines use this information by making decisions and taking “best practice” actions in accordance with the rules set forth by your product/process experts. Because we all know that rules are rules, but experience makes the difference.

Cincom Socrates streamlines sales and service processes by providing intelligent advice and guidance at the point of customer interaction.

The ability that Cincom’s Socrates application provides enables you to centralize and focus the knowledge based systems, rules and experience in your business. It enables your business to then make that information accessible to every division and employee who needs it. And Socrates does that rapidly, therefore negating the devastating impact that time-lagged knowledge transfer can often have on a company.

Estimating software has been around long enough for businesses and industry experts to track it’s evolution from the beginnings and benchmark it’s changes, adaptations and innovations over the years.

At first used as a stand-alone application, estimating software applied general algorithms to cross reference the type and cost of materials, the price assigned to the amount of time needed to produce the final product and the base cost of business specific add-ons. Basically the first estimating software applications had all of the functionality of an Excel spreadsheet. The need for more in-depth estimating software was earmarked as soon as it became apparent that the true costs of a project, especially a complex one, were more complicated than that.

Over the years, the base processing of estimation software systems were easy to understand for anyone in the business, but the perfection of execution remained tenuous, especially as new processes changed the businesses themselves, who then had to adjust their processes to match the change in business. (Which then changed the businesses, which then… well, you get the idea.)

The answer to truly useful cost estimating software was found when programmers, developers and business industry professionals agreed that a whole-system integration was needed to correctly address hidden costs inherent in production lifecycles, regulatory initiatives, channel differentials and more. Once estimating software was utilized as a module that integrated into a guided selling, bidding and estimation and knowledge based process, it’s true functions were realized.

One of the biggest mistakes that company with complex products can make is to reinvent the wheel with custom orders. Yes, it is true that custom products are just that, made to order and customized by the business for a specific client and product. It is the basics of products and manufacturing itself that do not change, however. A custom order for even complex products and services will still have quote-to-order, sales and product configuration. While the process itself has unlimited streamlining and correcting potential, the knowledge base for the original process and product will remain intact.

Process management from knowledge management

It is here that we must first apply a knowledge management process to gather the information and data, and then apply the knowledge and context to that data in order to create a knowledge management process that will be a tool, not another repository.

The value of Knowledge Management relates to a business not in the realm of data collection, but in the way in which the contextualized knowledge is managed to enable the members of the business to deal with current situations and effectively envision and mold their future. On demand access to data is nothing without the management that enables the capture, retention, and reuse of the knowledge foundation for imparting an understanding of how the pieces fit together. That in turn must be able to convey to users them meaningfully to some other person.

Access to managed knowledge bases allows your business members to fully address situations with the sum total knowledge of everything anyone in the organization has ever learned about a situation of a similar nature.

Knowledge management is one those business catch all phrases that has permeated the language to the point where some people’s eyes glaze over the second they hear it.

In order to impart the importance of real knowledge management, you have to show your employees three things:

1. What it is, in real terms without execuspeak
2. How it can help them do their job
3. How it can help grow the business

By ditching the execuspeak that so many employees almost instantly tune out, you can get their attention on knowledge management as a process, as a tool, as something real that they can both contribute to and gain from.

By showing your employees how knowledge management can directly assist them in their work, it ties into what all truly good employees want; they want to succeed, and a way to help them do that faster, better and more economically will be welcomed.

By showing your employees how knowledge management will help grow your business, you give them the key to understanding their part in the equation as it relates to the company as a whole, and how they share in the benefits of that success.

Knowledge management is essential to the growth of your business, however even a good knowledge management initiative will fail without the cooperation of your employees.
You know your business culture. Your executives, managers and sub-managers know their staffs and what kind culture of knowledge exists there already. Use the knowledge of your business culture to assess the correct way to build a knowledge management initiative that will be welcomed and utilized.

Managing your organization’s knowledge is one of the most important aspects of guiding a complex manufacturing enterprise to global greatness. For one thing, enterprise culture changes daily. And that includes knowledge.

Every time you hire a new employee you are changing your knowledge culture. Every time you promote someone to management you are affecting the culture of your company. And every time an employee quits, is fired or laid off, or retires, a resulting change in culture occurs.

Even within the overall culture of your enterprise, there are various subcultures. Cross-division transfers and cross-channel promotions also affect the culture and the relevant subcultures. Your workflows could change as a result of those transfers. Certain measurable outputs of one unit could go up while the same or similar output of the other goes down. And they may not change at the same speed or depth. Someone needs to be watching this.

With the proper tools at your disposal, you can keep a close eye on the culture and subcultures of your enterprise so that you maximize every opportunity. The importance of managing your tribal knowledge cannot be stressed enough.

Achieving a good profit margin is essential for all companies. Even more so is keeping that profit margin from dwindling month after month. It’s everyone’s primary focus in a company from the factory worker all the way up to the executive. They’re all looking to cut waste, streamline business processes and lower cost. Streamlining the front office is vital. 

 I’ve seen sales order error rates as high as 20% and it’s not uncommon to see companies content on operating with error rates up to 5%. The natural tendency is to think that a 97% order success rate is excellent (after all its only 3 out of every 100 orders that have errors).  This shifts the thinking to the “total cost of ownership” - driving managers to try to define what error rate “can we live with”. 

By how much might a 3% sales order error rate drive profits down? Far more than you might think. 

An often overlooked operating expense that drives costs up is “non-value add” activities. A recent study by the Association of Product Modeling indicates: 

 12.5% of resources are busy with non-value add activities
when the correctness of data falls to 97%.
If it falls to 92% you’ll see resources occupied
with non-value add activities jump to 50%.

-Lars Hvan, Product Customization, pg. 143

Imagine profits if correctness of sales order data was at 100%, eliminating all non-value add activities. Ensure that your sales orders are correct and decrease your errors; increase your profits. And this is easier than most people realize. Cincom’s Product Configurator has a success rate and testimonial profile of customers with over 99% sales order accuracy. 

Don’t settle for sub-par configuration tools.

Knowledge management is one of the most challenging aspects of the guided selling process for many complex manufacturing organizations. Many factors influence the way you manage your organization’s knowledge and how effectively you put it to good use.

First, there are different kinds of knowledge. How you approach the acquisition and preservation of knowledge says a lot about your organization’s culture. Do you use formal controls or informal discussions? Is your knowledge environment too structure or too loose? Do you have an aging work force? Do you have an effective work flow of knowledge that keeps it circulating in the important directions so that it serves as lubricant for your organization’s development?

One way to think about it is to consider your complex organization a living organism. Every new employee affects your culture by bringing something new into your sphere. Every time someone leaves - for whatever reason - your culture is affected. As a manager, your job is to ensure that tribal knowledge survives and continues to improve your efficiency and increase your ROI. What needs to be done today to make your knowledge management approach more effective?

Proper knowledge management is about time as much as knowledge. In fact, the time value of knowledge is as important a principles as any. It means that you care enough about your organization’s ROI tomorrow as you do today.

Managing Past Knowledge
You have employees that will soon leave your company. They’ll either retire or move on to greener pastures. Capturing their knowledge before they leave is an important task for managers. Some of your employees may have forgotten more things than you’ll ever know. Tapping into the knowledge of the past is as important as building knowledge for the future. If you can’t get a handle of that knowledge before those employees exit your doors then it will be gone forever.

Managing Knowledge Today
Of course, we must all live in the present. Training and building knowledge in today’s workforce is an important task for managers at all levels. Happy employees are well-trained and knowledgeable employees. You must train them and record the level of training that they have. You must allow that knowledge they’ve attained through coursework and experience to flourish within your organization. Mentorship is one way to do that. Having employees teach others is another. Either way, you need workflow management and knowledgement to work hand in hand so the organization can grow.

Tomorrow’s Knowledge Is Tomorrow’s
Past And Present
How far out do you plan? Five years? Ten years? Twenty years? Organizations that plan ahead stay ahead. It isn’t enough to think about your workforce today. What about your workforce next year or ten years from now? You have people who will join your team that you have not even thought of yet. The knowledge they bring when they get there will be just as important as the knowledge your retirees carry with them. You must be able to blend external knowledge with your internal knowledge and build your organization for the future. Knowledge management requires thinking ahead.

As organizations continue to store their knowledge in expert systems, product configurators, and other knowledge management systems, a valuable asset is created.  If you’ve been asked to provide a return on investment for a knowledge management initiative, below are a few questions that may help you build your business case:

•    What percentage of your company’s “book value” is based on intellectual assets?

•    Based on past trends, what percentage of your employees will retire or leave the company in the next 10 years?  What percentage of the company’s knowledge will they take with them?

•    What percentage of your tacit knowledge could be codified?  What percentage is actually codified?

•    What is the business strategy for the next 10 years?  How much of this business strategy is dependent on knowledge management?

•    Does your company have a written knowledge management strategy?  Does your company have a dedicated Chief Knowledge Officer or Chief Learning Officer function (CKO/CLO)?  If not, then who performs these roles, and how many hours a week are dedicated to the CKO/CLO role?

•    How many IT systems contain information that may be important to the knowledge management strategy?  Create a list of these systems, including the business unit that “controls” the system. Are these systems integrated?  What percentage of the information is structured, and assessable via business rules?

All of these questions may not apply to your situation, but hopefully you’ll be able to find the key questions that can help you build your case.

Enjoy The Day! 

Dan

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