Knowledge Management and Xerox

After reading these two articles on Xerox and their implementation of Knowledge Management, I was shocked to see how much they benefited from this. It also opened my eyes on how much a company I work for right now could use a system like this. There problem was a very common one, they have a large company that provides document and networking services, when they send technicians out to fix problems there are many times where these issues aren't written about. These problems can't just be looked up in a book so a lot of the times technicians have to solve these problems themselves. But like in many situations there will be other technicians having the same problems and having to spend the time to figure this out like the first tech. So the solution is to implement a Knowledge Management system to share the solutions of the technicians, to reduce time working on machines and get a more accurate and quick fix of the problem, the company created a online database to share these information to technicians and employees and allowed them to add or update solution records. This system had some great benefits. It allowed employees or technicians to work more productive and efficient because instead of five employees finding a solution to five identical problems, they would now have one employee sharing his solution to the other four employees so they could quickly fix the problem. This also saves the company money because a misdiagnoses is avoided and the employees are spending less time on the job. The difficulties faced with this though is getting the employees to actually take time out of their busy schedule to write up these solutions, to the problems. Xerox found a way of providing incentives for the employees to write these articles up they allowed these employees to attach their names to the articles so they could claim this and say it is their solution. It's amazing how much we could use a tool like this in my current job. I have worked for wolf camera now for about four years and we have about 300 stores in every store we have a wet lab printer there are many times a month where we have to repair our machines. A lot of these situations we (the employees) are having to find solutions to the problems because our service technicians can't make it out. It would be great if would had a KM system to share our findings to other stores so they could easily fix the problems and also help our service technicians out.  I learned a lot from these two articles and how beneficial to a company they can be for example just increasing productivity and efficiency.

Links to Articles

Xerox Article

Xerox Article