A view of the home page for welding in Caterpillar's Knowledge Network.

A welder at Caterpillar.

An assembly receives its plasma coating.

Computer aids in manufacturing have evolved to production monitors and maintenance minders from relatively simple bookkeeping and design tools. Communication lines now grant all parties design reviews and system evaluations from anywhere in the world, after which the project translates almost directly to the shop floor.

Despite the flexibility of computers, most companies still cache information among specialists — people who share specialized knowledge of a process or procedure via e-mail, telephone, or a direct visit to the point of inquiry. Such practices have become strained in global companies, particularly in the costly duplication of tactical and strategic solutions.

In the late '90s, managers at Caterpillar, the manufacturer of heavy off-highway equipment and engines, recognized that the company was shifting its business culture from "functional silos" — engineering, development, sales, and so on — to business units such as machines, engines and financial reporting. They realized the need to focus on business processes and on problem and solution sharing. In response, a system was developed within the company's in-house educational center (Caterpillar University, or CatU), and was dubbed the Knowledge Network.

Communities
"The Knowledge Network was completely 'home-grown,'" says Reed Stuedemann, who is the Network's process owner and administrator at Caterpillar. Caterpillar's Knowledge Network is used to solve business problems and to keep metrics on all activity. The set-up is familiar to any who have used Wikipedia, or visited on-line discussion/forum groups such as www.weldingweb.com

The password-protected Caterpillar site has different categories of discussion — referred to as "Communities of Practice" — that are very narrow in scope. Users seek their own communities and can join and leave at will, security levels permitting — more on this later. Communities can be as small as three members whose common interest may cross business unit, geographic and even corporate boundaries. Users ask and answer questions, share information, research specs, and otherwise organize, preserve, and leverage a particular organization's collective expertise.

People from outside the organization also can participate under the control of the Caterpillar Knowledge Network's security levels, and include dealers, customers, suppliers. According to Stuedemann, the program has 4,000 communities with 41,000 unique users in the last 12 months.

Welding as a community
Ron Taylor, supervisor of Advanced Structures Process, Research & Development Group at Caterpillar, has been using the Knowledge Network since its inception. One of Ron's early contributions was to create a specific welding community as a means of discussion across the enterprise of welding engineering standards and specifications, both general and company-specific. Community members include design engineers, production and service technicians, and others in related areas.

Caterpillar's welding site hosts questions that may relate to welding of certain materials, or regarding specifications on drawings. Such questions, notes Taylor, were handled previously via e-mail.

"A welding addendum now can be posted to the community," says Taylor, "and the community can respond and comment."

Items posted in a community are distributed to that community's members via e-mail, with "from KN" in the subject line, followed by author and title, and whether the post is a reply. Taylor says a query to all the welders in Caterpillar's welding community means immediate access to people around the world if you need a general consensus, or to identify processes. In a company with manufacturing divisions spread around the world, this means that a weld performed in Asia should meet the same quality standard as its counterpart in the United States. Moreover, if one person in the community hears of a new process, it can be shared and discussed throughout Caterpillar. The need for meetings and training sessions is reduced, too.

Managing knowledge
The Caterpillar Knowledge Network makes use of intangible assets — knowledge, experience, systems and brand equity. The system operates on a need-based principle and allows individuals to search and make their interest known if they do not meet the community security profile. Anybody can start a new community of practice if they have a need to collaborate on a relatively narrow topic and a community of practice for that subject does not already exist.

Once the need for the collaboration is at an end, the community no longer needs to remain in existence, but the knowledge gained during its tenure can be organized and retained by the company. Decentralized management coupled with the natural focus of communities of practice on tasks that must be accomplished means that the Caterpillar Knowledge Network always works to the advantage of the organization, works at its most efficient level, and ensures a high return on investment.

Does this mean an end to traditional hierarchies? "It's all about knowledge, and the ability to get what I need, when I need it," says Stuedemann. "KN moves the information held by individuals —'tacit content in people's heads,' formal certificates — and integrates the information into a community. Such knowledge does not recognize any organizational chart.

"In my opinion," continues Stuedemann, "there are two basic strategies for Knowledge Management: one is collecting — searching, retrieving, metatagging through gigabytes of digitized content. The other centers around connections — the people, the social side, who they are, where they are, what they do, and what they know. Once you bring the people together around a subject area or an activity, then you provide the ability for them to collaborate, identify who they are, allow them to see who their colleagues are, who has joined the community, where they are. They can bring in reference material and identify experts, as it relates to the purpose of the community. They can also link to information residing in other websites and databases."

Planning for a community
A community's "success" is not defined by amount of activity," says Stuedemann, explaining Knowledge Network in further detail. The community manager determines the community's purpose, which might be to provide a "reference area, or as a locator for expertise, or a safe source for links relevant to a project." Such a community can include text and photos, document uploads, PowerPoints, hyperlinks and any other relevant materials.

Within a community are "experts," as defined by a community's manager. Stuedemann defines an expert simply as "somebody that's done something I'm trying to do." A welding technology community, for example, may have people who buy welding technology, or are specialists researching welding. The community manager provides a description for the expert that's appropriate to the field.

Every community has a security profile. Direct addresses and phone numbers of individuals only come out of the Caterpillar directory, for security purposes. Knowledge Network also has its own search feature, called "Discovery Feature," for employees wishing to examine other topics. A full text search can be made in content and community. Additionally, an expert's description is a searchable field. When items are found, a title displays with a padlock symbol, which links to a "request access" box. The community's manager then determines access based on your written need and your identifiers.

Impact on a company
Several years after Caterpillar began Knowledge Network, the company performed a return-on-investment study and found the returns were more than double the amount the company spent for internally focused communities. Externally focused communities were demonstrating returns greater than seven times the company's investment. Moreover, 67 percent of the people looking for information received the information they needed.

Such a system can be applied to any operation that involves more than a single business unit to achieve a finished product. Caterpillar has begun licensing Knowledge Network to other organizations. Further information is available at www.catlic.com