As many baby boomers look forward to their retirement, manufacturing industry bosses fear the wealth of knowledge that will be lost with their departure.

To stem this drain of information, University of Cambridge researcher Dr Tony Holden has developed a software program which captures employees' experience as they work.

Dr Holden, Department of Engineering, designed the new program, entitled 'Lifetrack', being marketed by the US company The Works Software. The software was developed from the results of a two-year industrial research program sponsored by BP, Honeywell Control and Cambridge University to model the social, communication and information dimensions of how staff work in industrial manufacturing plants. The aim was to significantly improve plant safety, integrity and efficiency.

Serious problems at plants have been traced back to inconsistent views of the same operation. With Lifetrack, everyone has the same consistent view of operations to reduce the chance of misunderstandings and reduce the learning curve of new staff.

"Today, knowledge retention programs don't provide anything for capturing tacit knowledge where it really exists in an organization - with operational staff at the ground level", says Dinesh Vadhia, CEO of The Works Software. "The trick is to capture, retain and share knowledge while operational staff are doing their job".

The software connects the experience and knowledge of the past to solve the problems of today and tomorrow, making it possible to do things better than the last time.



Posted by: Ethan    Source