The car industry drives forward with knowledge management - Masterclass

Rethink IT, March, 2004

Few industries have a greater reliance on knowledge management than the automotive sector. Designing cars and getting them to market sufficiently quickly to maximize the return on the massive investment in their creation; minimizing the risk of being upstaged by a rival with a more appealing model or pricing; sharing the vast numbers of pieces of information that go to make a car among engineers, marketeers, dealers and customers; tracking the sales success of the machine. All these processes involve thousands and thousands of documents and facts, thousands of people, and the margin of error gets smaller by the year. Here we look at two approaches to the challenge, taken by Germany's Audi and the US' Ford Motor.

Audi recently announced that it would extend its use of the Livelink content management software from OpenText (now merging with Ixos) to deploy it on an enterprise-wide basis. The company had originally invested in Livelink--a suite of content tools including a knowledge management module--to develop a market research information system called MarCO (Market Research Competitor), used at its headquarters in Ingolstadt. The product will now become the primary knowledge management platform throughout the company, replacing various legacy systems.

The MarCO application is used to store all information gathered about competitors' current or upcoming vehicles from myriad sources, including the company's own competitive intelligence department, market research exercises, press and analyst articles, customer feedback and so on. All this information is stored, collated, tracked and cross-referenced, not just for the use of the intelligence and marketing departments, but also put online as a knowledge base open to many units within the company, as well as some key partners such as selected suppliers and dealers. Product planning, marketing, sales strategies and many other activities depend on the accuracy and the depth of analysis of the competitive data presented through the MarCO system.

Now the use of the software will be broadened to make it the standard information retrieval system for all forms of expert knowledge and research information. As well as storing and presenting such information, groups within Audi can form communities and workgroups around the platforms, collaborating on projects using the common knowledge base.

The company talks a lot about reducing the 'innovation cycle'--a phrase that covers not just design innovation in cars but new departures in marketing, sales methods, added value features such as in-vehicle technology and so on.

"Deploying the Livelink solution in all our knowledge areas was the next logical step in our strategy to increase employee productivity and shorten innovation cycles," said Tobias Schwab, project manager at Audi Ingolstadt.

He continued: "MarCO has enabled us to make our market research activities transparent enterprise-wide and ensure that all people involved in these activities are fully informed with access to the most current knowledge of the market in general and of our competitors in particular."

When choosing technologies to underpin such systems, flexibility is critical because of the range of inhouse applications and the variety of data sources and partner systems with which the application has to work. One feature of Livelink that helped in this respect was full independence of data sources. Also critical was support for online communities, a system that was completely web-based. This makes it easier to share knowledge and processes around the company, with an increasing uptake of web services and portals to improve matters further, and means the knowledge base is more easily integrated into the existing IT environment.

Schwab explained: "Knowledge management tools must allow people to share knowledge easily, exchange their views on a certain topic spontaneously and find an appropriate expert quickly. Livelink provides a single platform to share knowledge and new ideas. The management of knowledge flows translates into supporting processes."

Knowledge management for competitive intelligence and improved market understanding is vital at all major auto makers, but at Ford Motor the emphasis of the content management strategy is weighted most heavily towards customer satisfaction. Here, the company believes, distribution and manipulation of information is also a key success factor.

Steven Scheerhorn, manager of knowledge workplace infrastructure at Ford, said: "At Ford, customer satisfaction is our number one goal. How and what we communicate internally and externally is inextricably linked to that goal."

As at Audi, web services and the creation of knowledge bases on the intranet are important parts of the plan, allowing for easier sharing and collaboration, and more rapid decision making, even when 'virtual teams' are spread around many timezones. "We believe that the interact is one of our most important means of exchanging information between employees, customers, dealers, suppliers, and trading partners," Scheerhorn said. "Trusted content is at the heart of every such e-interaction."