Knowledge Management Solution

When it comes to knowledge management SMEs have a huge benefit over large organisations. We all have examples there of when the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand’s doing. However when it comes to ‘you’re sure you’ve got the information but you don’t know where to find it’ everyone’s in the same boat.

Knowledge management is about creating a corporate knowledge base, without expending vast sums of money, which can be searched from any direction and quickly find the relevant information.

The cost-effective way of creating this corporate knowledge base is by letting the staff build it as an automatic by-product of their day-to-day work. So the trick is to achieve it in the normal course of work, preferably in a manner which improves that person’s work for example by improving job satisfaction, by empowering them with more (relevant) information and by making their job easier. This all needs to be done electronically so that it really ‘can be searched from any direction quickly’. Oh and it would be handy if we could do it whenever convenient and wherever we are.

At a ‘simple’ technical level, it’s about being able to search every piece of data in the company to find the bit you want. The pre-requisite of course is to try to get the information into one system as in so doing all the links to people and projects etc. are already present. It is much simpler for SME’s to achieve this and eLink Advantage™ knowledge management solution provides the data environment and the simple effective systems for staff to create your corporate knowledge base without realising they are doing it.

So, if only everyone could be persuaded that they get a direct benefit from doing something, which happens to give the result from which someone else benefits, it would all be solved, for example:

• Engineers and salesmen filling in visit reports for comments about a particular product or service

• Telephone and support staff putting information direct into an action for a colleague to handle

• Support staff splitting the information in a support call into ‘problem description’, ‘problem diagnosis’ and ‘problem cure’

If this sort of information is available, then someone else can access it to take action to cure the fault at inception, or to find the answer when another customer has the same problem or indeed a related problem. Or on a different note it could be to enable someone to save time and resources it creating the best solution for a prospect’s needs. Or on a different note may be the marketing team need to come up with ideas for a press release.

“Your most precious possession is not your financial assets. Your most precious possession is the people you have working there, and what they carry around in their heads.…”- Robert Reich

In the eLink Advantage™ business management system you get the best of both worlds as the corporate knowledge base is in a largely structured format which we supplement with an unstructured search facility which can look for character strings, words or phrases; the search can be limited to a particular period of time or user or area of the database. It’s all standard functionality, so the clever bit is in devising how to get the data in easily, to get it in ‘free of any costs’ and then how to set up easy queries to take the searcher to his solution quickly and easily. We can train your staff and also we’ll be there standing by.

The benefits of using the eLink Advantage™ knowledge management solution are:

• More effective workforce because it’s easier to disseminate information, preferably self-disseminating and because knowledge about your policies, working equipment used, personnel resources, products and services sold, joint projects that people are working on, marketing strategies and current sales activities, is all available for authorised executives and staff to search for information to help them. Any search will automatically include the latest information

• Improved security and risk protection because the information is building into the Corporate Knowledge Base, held on a resilient system under high data protection rules

• Better knowledge transfer for covering for job-sharing and for holiday and sickness absences; also enabling new staff to become more effective faster and facilitating cross-fertilisation of ideas between people in different divisions of the company

• Better management and control because all the actions and follow-ups are extremely visible whenever and wherever and because there is a wealth of management information available, all leading to

• Better customer relationship management

• Higher probability of faster corporate developments

• Improved sales turnover

• Improved staff productivity

• Reduced costs

• Improved profitability

The system stands on its own as your knowledge management solution or because of the interconnection with other modules available within the eLink Advantage™ business management system, it can be used as a starting point for a more comprehensive business management solution. 

Your initial solution can be amended and extended by you on-demand, live on your system at any time, it will grow and adapt to match how your organisation grows and adapts to your market needs.