Capturing product development knowledge with task patterns: evaluation of economic effects

Importance of managing organizational knowledge for manufacturing enterprises has been recognized since decades. This paper addresses two specific aspects of organizational knowledge modelling: (1) capturing organizational knowledge for supporting product development with so called task patterns and (2) evaluation of task pattern use with focus on economic effects achieved. Starting from an industrial case of product development, the paper introduces the concept of task patterns and the method used for development. The evaluation of task pattern use in product development is based on an adaptation of the balanced scorecard approach. The industrial application of task patterns did not only prove feasible and deployable, but resulted also in a number of positive evaluation results. There is reason to believe that lead times can be shortened, the quality of product documentation increases, and the quality of best practices in general seems to improve when using active knowledge models instead of conventional documentation.