Despite having 93 business units, Indian conglomerate Tata Group has no difficulty in sharing knowledge within the huge organisation. A knowledge centre shared by all units drives the ever-expanding enterprise to excellence.

In comparison, though having no central unit or a concrete system, Toyota Motor Corp - now on its way to becoming the world's largest auto-maker - transfers knowledge from veteran workers to new recruits in a practical way.

These tips were shared at a recent seminar, "IPC 2007: APO Inter-national Productivity Conference", hosted by the Thailand Productivity Institute in conjunction with the Asian Productivity Organisation.

The seminar was organised in line with the realisation that knowledge management would be the key to improve an organisation's productivity, no matter what business they are in.

To the Tata Group, knowledge management (KM) is the core tool to maintain its competitiveness in diverse industry sectors in-cluding steel, chemical, software, coffee, watches and power.

"We have learned that every time staff leave our companies, their knowledge has gone with them and our knowledge is gradually reduced. Hence, we put knowledge management in the group's strategy to ensure our staff at all levels are able to maintain knowledge at all time," said TS Rangarajan, software management consultant of Tata Consultancy Services Ltd - one of the Tata Group's 93 companies.

The group has put in place a team as a centre for managing knowledge among all 93 subsidiaries. At the same time, it has the Tata Business Excellence Model (TBEM), which is a

framework of what each com-pany should do to have the best practice of knowledge management.

It also keeps a benchmark for the knowledge management work to ensure its high working standard.

The framework features business results, focus on human resources, process management, customer and market focus, strategic planning and leadership. Any subsidiary that achieves the model is acknowledged as a great success during the group's annual meeting.

The group has had TBEM since 1995. But its first step in applying knowledge management started in 1999, beginning with its steel business - Tata Steel. The company realised a clear vision was needed to know its direction and how it could maximise benefits from knowledge management. Otherwise, it was useless to have knowledge management.

Three knowledge management strategies the group has pursued are codification, personalisation and knowledge diffusion.

The first strategy requires everybody in Tata Steel to acquire their own knowledge and use it to maximise their own performance. The second strategy involves transferring the personal knowledge across divisions or departments as well as transferring it across customers and suppliers. The third strategy involves exchanging knowledge among divisions and between the company-customers, company-suppliers and suppliers-customers.

To manage the knowledge, Tata Steel uses information technology as the main tool, including computers and websites. The company staff have a strong culture of using IT as working equipment and in daily life. Hence, it is easy to convince the staff to share knowledge through equipment they already know.

The success of its efforts at knowledge management can be seen from the MAKE (Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises) Asia award that it received for two successive years in 2003 and 2004; and the Indian MAKE award for another two years consecutively in 2005 to 2006. Also, it was awarded the APQC best practice partner.

The Tata Group then ex-

panded the use of knowledge management to its other businesses. Strategies at its other companies include Community of Practice (CoP) - a stage for people to exchange their ideas and knowledge - which could happen anywhere, such as during a coffee break or lunch and on websites or via e-mail.

CoP is the main tool for knowledge management in Tata Group's watches and coffee businesses, while IT is the main tool in its other businesses.

One important thing for effective knowledge management is to put all knowledge together in a systematic way. Since the Tata Group has operations all over India (not counting its operations in 40 countries), and the staff speak different languages and dialects, it needs to translate all knowledge into the commonly used world language - English - before recording it into well-organised documents.

While the Tata Group's main concern behind using knowledge management is not to lose knowledge every time staff leave the group, Toyota Motor Corporation's concern is the strong globalisation trend that makes business competition stronger all the time.

"The quicker the globalisation trend, the quicker we have to train our human resources," said Toyota Motor Corp's senior managing director Atsushi Nimi.

Developing human resource skills at all times is needed to further create new technology.

The company, actually, has conducted knowledge management within its organisation since it was established, as Japan has always had a strong culture of learning, reading and sharing things.

It keeps training staff at all levels from high-ranking executives to operational level. Up to the present, about 6,600 staff in Japan and about 2,600 in the rest of the world have attended its training programmes. All training is conducted by its training centres worldwide.

Toyota believes fully equipped training and well-organised documentation are as important as making all processes, equipment and technical things easy for everyone to understand. Veterans in specific working lines and in innovative technologies and equipment such as video and other programmes are needed.

Training for people at the operation level focuses on honing their skills in every automobile manufacturing step, including assembly and paint shops.

The training for supervisors focuses on learning manufacturing standards of each part, but even they have to train on real production lines, and how to check whether each vehicle has achieved the standards. Here, they have to inspect the products themselves and see whether they have achieved the right levels.

Toyota sees training as not only enhancing the skills and knowledge of all staff, but also creating a strong bond between the company and the staff.

In developing innovation, Toyota encourages all people involved with all technologies to share their ideas.

Toyota follows three steps, from initiating ideas to the finished product: at first, its staff discuss necessary details, such as the desired quality for each product, and how much of resources are required; the discussion then leads to drawings and the technology for making the product real; in the final step, the information from the first two steps is used for production.

To have the best knowledge management practice like the Tatas and Toyota, there is no exact platform. "One needs to find the right approach according to the organisation and be very patient in conducting knowledge management, as it can take at least three to five years top witness the change," said Professor Ikujiro Nonaka of Japan's Hitotsubashi University.

Nitida Asawanipont

The Nation