The knowledgebased organization - effective use of experience (dissertation)

Today companies have to adapt quickly to changing conditions caused by the globalization of sales and procurement markets, the shortening of product life cycles and the demand for a greater product diversity. In order to meet the demands of a dynamically changing environment companies have to develop appropriate strategies and concepts. Our society becomes more and more knowledge-oriented, therefore the question of how to handle knowledge is gaining importance. Due to this trend the experience of each employee becomes a valuable resource for a learning organization. Especially in the automotive industries “Front Loading” is used to reduce the time of product development. The learning from former projects respectively the learning form experiences made before helps to put “Front Loading” into action. FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) is an established method in the automobile industry, which helps to foresee technical risks. This sets the goal for this work. The goal of this work is to develop an operative framework for the efficient management of experience within social-technical systems using FMEA as an example. The framework is designed to make better use of knowledge / experience within FMEA. A knowledge-based FMEA will be established. The term “experience” will be analysed more closely in order to guarantee an appropriate conception of the framework. As a result this work shall enable each employee to make decisions on the basis of the experience that has already been accumulated within the organization.