By Chris Koyianis
What exactly is Tribal Knowledge, and does it hurt or help your business? Tribal Knowledge is everything a person knows that is not captured in a format that others can learn from. Today we live in a knowledge society. Manufacturing has evolved from being a laborious process to a series of tasks requiring technical knowledge, training, and education to create the products and services that society consumes. Along with the requirement of this knowledge, the failure to document this knowledge leads to situations where a person is relied on heavily to complete a process, task, or troubleshoot issues. If that person is not available, then the task waits or is completed haphazardly by others who do not know the process as well.
This internalized knowledge that humans possess is not necessarily bad. In fact, this knowledge is extremely important and critical to business success. The difficulty lies in capturing this knowledge so there are no critical failures if the person holding the knowledge is unavailable.
ERP systems are excellent for capturing data, but not processes. Quality Management Systems are designed to capture processes and procedures and can be an effective method of capturing Tribal Knowledge, however, they do have their limits.
Planet Together, an industry-leading advanced planning and scheduling software can capture process-related Tribal Knowledge so that it can be executed and used consistently. As an example, if your process requires jobs to be sequenced according to colors, flavors, or allergens, this can be set up in a matrix that Planet Together can use to schedule the jobs correctly according to the sequence defined in the matrix. What if your process is defined by size? For example, Machine A can run sizes 1 and 2 black and Machine B can run sizes 2 and 3 white. Planet Together will schedule the size 2 black jobs on Machine A and the size 2 white jobs on Machine B. No need to rely on the planner to adjust all the size 2 jobs. This will free up the planner’s time to work on other tasks.
Contact Scheduling Solutions today to find out more about PlanetTogether APS software implementation and how it can help you capture and leverage your Tribal Knowledge for better scheduling outcomes. Our solutions can also integrate with platforms like OpCenter to further improve manufacturing execution and scheduling effectiveness.
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