Capturing & re-using common practice
A manufacturer’s greatest intellectual-property
asset is its “common practices”—“the way we do
things around here.” Over time, each company
develops ways to do things that work. These
processes are often poorly documented, if at all. So
when people leave the company, this important
corporate knowledge may leave with them.
When all conceptual design is performed with
the help of KollabNet, common practices are
implicitly captured. And it is done in a way
that does not require engineers to think about
them, or to type descriptions; they just use the
system, and the DesignMaps are created. They can
then be evaluated, edited, sorted, and stored as
the company’s growing knowledge base.
So when a new engineer comes on board, or
someone needs to perform a design task that is
only required infrequently, they can refer to
the library of DesignMaps. With these as
common-practice templates, new hires can be
brought rapidly up to speed, and infrequent
design tasks can be handled as if everyone had a
photographic memory.
