KEYNOTE SPEAKER ADDRESS: The Creation & Management of Knowledge in the Rubber Compounding Industry

The rubber industry is divided into tyre and non-tyre. The skills in both sectors are similar and transferable. Those willing and able to observe and try different ways of making the rubber work acquire these skills over many years. As people in which experience is embedded retire the industry is depleted of invaluable knowledge. In order to replace this wealth of knowledge we embark on the well known repetitive processes consuming valuable ‘smart time’, this can be eliminated. Highly trained and experienced staff find themselves engaged in repetitive tasks generating data that is used once and then treated as a valuable asset. This behaviour has manifested itself in treating business to business relationships as single ‘transaction’ interactions, when in fact there is more to be gained by developing relationships to facilitate the ‘multiple or repeat’ interactions that are critical to the creation of knowledge. In general we have created organisations where we expect ALL processes to be simple & binary. Simple, we can engineer. Human beings are far more complex and are required to make choices based on more than factors. Each individual is hardwired to behave in a certain way, it is these behaviours that we need to take into account, more to the point it is these very behaviours that we all feel comfortable with, that generate the results required which we need to embed in our company processes. The data requires several different manipulations in order to make it useful. Company strategy will be pivotal in deciding how the data is processed, what form the data is subsequently presented in and ultimately what action it takes. Data can be transformed into knowledge, once the benefit is seen it becomes self-perpetuating. Knowledge is the only source that increases the more you use it.