2005 Computerworld Honors Program

	Knowledge Sharing Buckman Laboratories, Inc. Memphis, TN USA Year: 1997 Status: Award Recipient Category: Manufacturing Nominating Company: Ernst & Young LLP
	An on-line network, counteracting the grade school precept that personal success depends on the hoarding of knowledge, encourages associates to succeed by sharing.
	Buckman Holdings Inc. coordinates the activities of the twenty associate Buckman companies worldwide. Nineteen of these companies are engaged in some eighty countries worldwide marketing and selling the specialty chemicals that are manufactured at eight strategically placed locations. The twentieth company, Buckman Laboratories International Inc., provides the support functions (R&D, Legal, Marketing, Knowledge Transfer, etc.) to these profit centers worldwide. The companies employ some 1300 people with annual sales approaching US$ 300 million. A central tenet of our basic philosophy is that to be a player in today's global market an organization must have access to the available international information in a more timely manner than ever before. In order to make sound strategic decisions a company needs the pertinent up-to date information on worldwide competitors, customers, joint ventures, trading opportunities and economic developments. This requires a commitment from everyone within the organisation to provide the necessary resources ( people, time, and money) converting ideas and wishes into reality. The application of all three resources not only accumulates the data but more importantly their interaction facilitates its transformation into the more valuable new collective corporate knowledge. To many companies this knowledge is contained within the various databases and other repositories dotted around the corporation. This is indeed true for the explicit knowledge. "For us the more abundant knowledge, and the more important, is resident behind the eyes and between the ears of our associates worldwide, in their minds" - to quote Bob Buckman. This is the tacit knowledge. This is the "unconscious knowledge" that awaits the arrival of an opportunity to become visible and useful in a new situation. We are smaller than our major competitors so to achieve our corporate goals requires us to use our resources more intelligently. The decision was made to focus those limited resources at that crucial area of cash generation - the interface with our customers. Our future viability therefore would depend upon our ability to be more effective and efficient at responding to the needs of our customers. Put simply our goal is to benefit directly by connecting all our associates worldwide, harnessing all this collective explicit and tacit knowledge and focusing it upon improving the performance of our customers. Our K'Netix system was established as the enabling technology that would facilitate this knowledge sharing and support the culture change we believed necessary if we were not only to survive as a corporation but to grow. K'Netix - The Buckman Knowledge Network is a customer focused, dynamic, structured yet flexible, multi-dimensional system. It has evolved continuously and at this point in its evolution is represented by an interconnected collection of databases (repositories of all the pertinent information pertaining to our customers and their manufacturing processes, electronic forums with their attendant libraries, virtual conference rooms, e-mail and bulletin boards) that support the rapid exchange of knowledge between associates who are separated by both time and space. Access to K'Netix is via KAM (K'Netix Access Menu) and in the example illustrated has six folders of databases: BL Systems folder is open revealing its component databases all of which relate more to our business operation systems. Buckman folder contains a complementary set of databases concentrated and focused more around the application of our technical knowledge to solve our customers' problems. The four Forums constitute the central pivot of our knowledge sharing and capture and are accessible by all employees worldwide. Think of the forum as a town where the inhabitants greet each other at the message board. Since the people are not always there at the same time they leave messages on the message board. The message board is subdivided into areas (sections) where messages relevant to specific topics are concentrated. All the messages relating to a particular topic are collected together as a thread and filed in dedicated areas within a structure called the library. The third main function of the forum is the conference area where members can meet at a prearranged time and communicate on-line with each other around any topic of mutual interest. The TechForum and ForoLatino are open to all employees and have similar internal structures. The major difference is language, Spanish is used in our ForoLatino which was created at the request of our Spanish speaking associates. To use the TechForum as the example, the twenty sections each with their own message boards where the messages are posted, conference rooms to facilitate debate, library sections where the communication threads and other pertinent knowledge is stored. The twenty sections fall into one of three groups; - thirteen are devoted to the business areas within Buckman Laboratories, for example Pulp & Paper, Leather etc and are focused upon improving our customer's productivity - six sections are primarily focused internally and designed to improve our operational efficiency and effectiveness as an organization, for eg Human Resources, Plant Operations, Safety/Environrnent, KT Topics/Help etc and - the Breakroom and Bulab News sections are areas where our associates are free to debate any topic they choose. Due to the proprietary nature of the contents access to both the ChemForum and the Customer Forums is limited to those with a "need to know". The structure of the ChemForum is similar to the more open forums. Of the present twelve sections: - five are used by our R&D and manufacturing staff worldwide to discuss our new emerging unpatented technologies - the remaining seven are used by the individual business functions to share their thoughts on topics of global importance and through debate determine our global response. The fifth in our collection of databases located in the Buckman folder is our Marketing Information Data Analysis System designated by the MIDAS icon and contains an intimate knowledge of a specific customer and the processes and how our two organisations interact to improve their productivity. This structured database is focused exclusively upon the capture, sharing and retrieval of information specific to an individual customer and access to this database is at the discretion of the account representative and their management. "Clicking" on the MIDAS icon brings to the PC screen the content taken directly from the MIDAS Training Manual. Each of the folders contains important information relevant to the customer, a detailed analysis of the customer and their processes, in addition to what, why and how our products are used. It affords an analysis of the reasons that resulted in failure or success. When the customer changes their process we can determine better how we should respond. This detailed information is a key link in assuring the customer that they can expect the best possible service at all time. For example if the person with primary account responsibility is on vacation, the customer is confident knowing that should the need arise all the pertinent information is stored and available to meet that need. This Customer Information Center (CIC) is an unstructured database and is used by the front line sales representatives to store electronic copies of documents. These documents are all communications with a specific customer and include memos, report of call, Technical Service Laboratory reports, etc. Access is restricted to the account representative and their management. As above with MIDAS it is another part of our striving to ensure that all the pertinent information about a customer is always available to aid us in providing the best possible support of their business. The other folders shown in the K'Netix access Menu contain databases, tools etc. that are not directly related to knowledge sharing and the contents are very user specific. Benefits Has your project helped those it was designed to help? In your opinion, how has it affected them? What new advantage or opportunity does your project provide to people? Has your project fundamentally changed how tasks are performed? In your opinion, have you developed a technology that may lead to new ways of communicating and processing information? What change might unfold? Yes! We have associates worldwide contributing regularly to the many knowledge sharing databases within the K'Netix system. We cannot demonstrate simply the accumulation of information within our MIDAS and CIC databases but we can give a brief snapshot of the activity in our Forums for the last quarter of 1996. The numbers record both the number of individual topics posted by our associates and the messages offered by others in response. This is an underestimate of the activity as many associates do not add duplicate response opinions in a conscious effort to avoid "information overload". Realizing they have the technical support of the total available knowledge within the company and that they are not alone in addressing the complexity of a customer's manufacturing process, gives them more confidence that they can succeed in being of greater benefit to that customer. This focus on our customers via our front line sales force is best illustrated by the comment made by one of them, Doug Yoder, who noted: "At Buckman when you ask one person a question, you have the power of 1200 employees behind you - including our CEO Bob Buckman. Our added value is not just speed of response but also global solutions. Our knowledge network is a pillar of our culture. And it's there to help you." This free and open exchange both within each associate company and across company and geographic boundaries is moving us closer to the goal of being truly a global company and not a collection of associated companies located in some 19 countries. The creation and sharing of new knowledge was driven in the late 1980s in part by one of our business strategies that required that 25% of all sales within each individual company should be from products with less than five years of active sales. In 1995 when our corporate strategy was modified this objective was changed to read: " Focus resources on the commercialization of new products for our primary and secondary target industries which will provide value to our customers and profit to our corporation". To achieve this goal involves the cooperation and focus of every employee involved from the time the salesperson identifies the opportunity to the point where the product either solves the customer's problem or improves the efficiency or effectiveness of their process(es). In the 4 years prior to K'Netix we had achieved 22.2% of our sales from new products, in the 4 years after introduction this figure has risen to 32.9%. This 50% improvement reflects our improved ability to develop more rapidly new products to meet the changing needs of our customers. At this time the impact upon "society" as a whole is very limited and is realised indirectly via the more efficient and effective manufacturing processes of the many customers we serve. The widespread recognition of our leadership in this area of knowledge sharing within our organization for the benefit of our customers has attracted some attention. Some 30+ companies have visited with us to learn first hand of our work. Many articles have been written reporting our efforts and progress, for example Fortune, Nov. 1995, p202-203 and The Fast company, July 1996. Many of these sources have commented favorably upon our knowledge capture and sharing abilities and some have returned to learn more. The most recent article is scheduled to appear in the Fortune Feb. 1997 and reports our success as the winners of The Arthur Andersen 1996 Enterprise Awards for Best Business Practices - Category, Sharing Knowledge in the Organisation.
	To respond to the need to leverage the knowledge of the global organization in finding the best solutions to specific customer problems, the Knowledge Transfer Department of Buckman Laboratories developed the K'Netix system. This was done by integrating various technologies which as a whole provide the organization with a unique way of identifying customer problems, finding the best information available and building new knowledge in the organization. The business model supported by K'Netix begins with working with and listening to customers and identifying gaps between where they are in their business and where they would like to be. With access to experts around the world, and both internal and external knowledge bases, a solution is developed and presented to the customer where the cycle continues by again listening to the customer. Compuserve was chosen as the e-mail and forum provider as well as the network provider largely due to its emphasis on the individual, dial-connected user. While this technology is not new, its use as a global business communication platform was a radical departure from the traditional IT solution for these services. Users around the world use e-mail and forums to share knowledge via private messages, company-wide discussions and documents authored using tools on the PC. The ability for associates to communicate solutions that respond to customer problems is extremely important. Tools are provided to create documents, tables, charts, graphs, diagrams, etc. which become the explicit manifestation of the tacit knowledge invoked by the original problem posed. The MIDAS PC module is a part of the K'Netix system developed by Buckman using Visual Basic and Microsoft Access. It was written to address the customer information needs of the specific industries we serve. Information on the client is transmitted to the central system using Oracle Mobile Agent technology where it is stored in an Oracle DBMS. Consolidated reporting from the information is available on Buckman's intranet web system. The Customer Information Center uses Lotus Notes both on the PC and on the central repository to track customer-related documents. Notes also is also used for the LearningSpace distance learning application and the customer service call tracking system. The K'Netix Access Menu (KAM) was developed by Buckman using Visual Basic to provide a simple and easy to use interface to all applications and tools. In addition to program launching it manages communication for applications that require connection to other computers or networks. Each user receives the menu system pre-configured with standard applications. Other applications can be added as required by the user. When network applications are selected from KAM on the PC, a dial-up connection to the K'Netix Network Architecture (KNA) is initiated. Connecting to the system with a single phone call, remote users have the same access capabilities as those in the office. Buckman associates using KNA/KAM make this dial-up connection to the Compuserve X.25 network. The KNA utilises the TCP/IP protocol across the Compuserve X.25 network to provide transparent access to the various systems and external resources of K'Netix. The Compuserve X.25 network is connected to Buckman's backbone ethernet segment by dual 256kb lines. Once this connection is established, the entire set of K'Netix systems becomes available to the user. Two T1 lines connect the Compuserve Information Services frame relay network to the ethernet segment for access to e-mail and forums. Another T1 line provides associates with unlimited access to Internet resources. Internal systems directly connected to the ethernet segment include Lotus Notes servers running on Windows NT, Oracle RDBMS applications running on AIX systems and mainframe applications such as Order Entry, Sales Analysis, Product Information Management and Accounting systems. Notebook computers are used almost exclusively in the entire organisation. All of K'Netix is focused on putting power on the front line where the strategic process of problem-solving takes place. A single sign-on from anywhere in the world provides users with access to all of the K'Netix systems.
	Our first formal and organized system to both share and capture knowledge within our organization worldwide dates back to 1988 when our Case History system was initiated. A case history is an electronic copy recording how a front-line sales associate created new knowledge within our organization. They did so by resolving a problem at their customer's business either by applying existing "Buckman knowledge" if it was a well documented problem or by developing a new more effective or efficient solution if it was a new problem. This repository can be accessed by any associate worldwide using their PC and having access to a phone line. It has full text search capabilities. To date we have some 2472 case histories, 1787 in English and the remainder in Spanish and are accessed via the Case Hist. icon. Bob Buckman in his address to the 4th Wave Meeting, November 16, 1994, stated: " In my opinion, to compete in the world that is coming down the pike towards us like a big freight train, we will have to do a much better job of getting the collective minds of this organization effectively engaged on the front line solving our customer's problems. It is called many names. I call it putting the power on the front line so that we can close the gap better than our competition." Our commitment to this philosophy of knowledge sharing is best illustrated by the formation of a department in 1992 dedicated to this function, the Knowledge Transfer Department (KTD). The mission statement for this department is: Plan, organize and manage information system applications, infrastructure and associated resources necessary to rapidly disseminate collective industry, technical and market knowledge in order to gain a sustainable, global, competitive advantage by proactively responding to the information and knowledge needs of Buckman Laboratories worldwide. The importance of this department is underscored by both its position in the corporate structure, reporting directly to the Chairman, Buckman Laboratories International Inc., and by its budget US$8.4 million (1994) and US$9.7 million (1995).
	K'Netix is not a project, with a clearly defined finite goal, with a beginning and an end. It is a journey without end and has invaded the fabric of our corporation. As shown earlier we are sharing both the explicit and tacit knowledge available within the company for the benefit of our customers. This new knowledge is captured, used and then filed for possible future use. To date we believe it has achieved our expectations - see the knowledge sharing activity noted in our Forums. The "acid test" that all this activity is not just that, activity, is best illustrated by the knowledge sharing captured as a thread. This thread was initiated by our General Manager in Singapore who had an opportunity to bid for some new business but did not have the required knowledge resident within his company. The responses commenced three hours after he posted his request, from a person in Memphis R&D. Over the next two days additional knowledge was contributed by other associates located in an additional five countries. This rapid and complete sharing of knowledge resulted in Buckman Asia being successful in winning the business. There are several such examples but they only serve to reinforce the basic strength of the system, namely: Global teamwork, Customer driven, Anywhere/Anytime and Speed of Response. We are now exploring more aggressively the potential contained within our Customer Forums. These allow a specific customer's employees worldwide to communicate among themselves and with those Buckman associates with whom they interact. The company is allocated one section, both parties are responsible for nominating those of their respective employees that have access to this section. Associated with each customer section is a related "Buckman only" section where those Buckman associates who interact with the customer can discuss their global strategies. The next step on our journey of knowledge generation is to focus upon increasing the knowledge content resident within each associate, "enabling them to be the best that they can be". We expect to achieve this by making available to each associate, independent of their geographical location, the best available education and training opportunities and delivering it at a time of their choosing. Early in 1996 we selected The LearningSpace from Lotus Development Inc. as the software to support our distance learning project. The software is a distributive learning tool consisting of an interconnected network of Notes databases, structured yet flexible and learner focused . We successfully completed our pilot testing of the delivery system loaded with some of our Buckman specific technical content in December 1996. The full complement of constituent technical courses are being developed by our experienced in-house experts and will appear simultaneously in the two most important languages within our companies, English and Spanish. We are using translation software (Systran) to facilitate this process. During the later half of 1997 we will begin to offer the training material in Portuguese, the third most important of our languages. Mandarin Chinese is our fourth target language. When we actually achieve this is dependent upon the availability of the software. The in-house generated technical content will be supplemented by both technical and non technical courses developed by non-Buckman associates. At present we are in discussions with Universities around the world, some of whom have registered with the IBM Global Campus, with a view of making more diverse educational opportunities available for our staff. The worldwide distribution and incorporation of this new approach to our training and education will commence immediately upon receipt of the Notes 4.5 production software, expected early 2nd quarter of this year. We expect this blend to deliver a richer learning experience to all our associates worldwide.