Towards Standardization of Custom Projects via Project Profile Matching

Most enterprises producing and offering high-end customized products face major internal communication and alignment issues. Typically, these occur in the context of individual projects within the organization consisting of various sites, plants or other points of operation (e.g., engineering companies, customer sites,…) where valuable experience and knowledge is gained. The source of the issues is that projects are conducted within a project team’s horizon and are not supported by a systematic and easy-to-use way of reusing knowledge gained in the past. This is confirmed by the statement of Mr. Banus, Country Business Unit Head Compression at Siemens Nederland NV, saying that “[Every project] has to start from an empty paper towards a package, but following a formalized procedure”. Especially in customisation projects, where every project team is continuously developing new product features, new processes, or handling the use of diverse materials, the knowledge alignment issue leads to the frequently occurring problem of re-inventions and re-developments [2]. Referring to Nonaka-Takeuchi’s SECI model [8], there are established theories of how to improve and persist organizational knowledge. However, in the large organizations we visited there is currently no satisfactory systematic way to store existing knowledge gained in previous projects. For example, files are often stored in a variety of ways, and most of the company’s intellectual capital is under-used or even lost. There are existing content management systems (CMS) like Livelink [4], Microsoft SharePoint [5] and ShareNet [10] that have already existed for years, but none meets and exploits the needs of global enterprises. This mismatch leads to the conclusion that organizations face the central problem of poor knowledge sharing, leading to repetitive and costly re-inventions of the wheel [2].