Implementation & Analysis of Knowledege Center in Babcock Borsig Softech (P) Limited, Chennai

Abstract

Knowledge Center is a knowledge integration system and corroboration engine designed to facilitate an evolving multi-disciplinary dialog leading to new insights and discoveries and to bring the benefits of collective wisdom to the organisation’s decisions.
Babcock Borsig Softech (P) Ltd., Chennai is a complete engineering design solution provider with a strong pedigree of working with global clients, offering end-to-end engineering solutions. It is a 100% EOU registered with STPI. The study was done in Civil & Structural department of BBSPL, which provides all essential tools for an error-free logging, management and distribution of the data required for the projects in the departments/organization.
The documents maintained by C&S department staff were not shared by others and both soft and hard copies were not in order. These problems resulted in low productivity, more time consumption, duplication, wrong referencing, more storage space, poor presentation and poor updation.Hence a knowledge center had been proposed to overcome the above problems with greater availability and sharing in less time. This study had been done to identify and apply a suitable methodology for assessing the knowledge processing environment of the company and to analyse the performance of the knowledge centre, which provides the organization, a sound baseline from where knowledge-based interventions can be launched.

The required data like policies and programmes that impact the knowledge processing practices and behavior of the members were collected through duel moderator focus groups, personal interviews and  questionnaires. The minutes of the meeting of the focus group were  recorded. The meetings were arranged twice to frame the system and review the same. On the basis of the investigation, a generic folder structure was created. As the project changes over time and the knowledge increases the structure can be updated.
The questionnaires were answered by the C&S department staff to elicit information about the working method and the time spent before and after implementing KC. SPSS has been used to evaluate the effectiveness of implementation of the KC through percentage analysis and Paired T test. The analyses found improved knowledge sharing culture, reduced searching and checking time, improved indexing and updation, reduced development cycle time, improved data utilization & management, reduced rework, reduced paper work and increased availability of documents.

The study recommends the C&S department to decide upon the knowledge processing practices which would be valuable to the organization, including financial assistance for formal training and to  decide and formulate the desired policies and programmes to render impetus to those practices that are considered to be of value. This research explored how organizations go about producing and integrating
knowledge.