Maintaining the corporate memory

A well known fact is that corporations don’t have memories. This is because the majority of the knowledge is maintained in the employees’ heads and when they leave that knowledge walks out with them. This continues to be the bane of process safety as errors get perpetuated and incidents repeated. A system can be created, though, to form and keep a corporate memory by accumulating the knowledge as it is developed and saving it in an organized manner, to be easily found and used by others as needed. In a previous paper we saw how knowledge can be organized. In this paper we will show that knowledge is best shared by example (for instance, we would like to design our plant based on the best applicable designs available), and how it can be continually collected with little effort once a proper workflow has been adopted. In this workflow the knowledge is reviewed and indexed as part of the collection process and organized into the niches of a previously created framework. The resulting knowledge infrastructure serves as the corporate memory and besides being a boon to process safety, it becomes an efficiency machine (no more need to reinvent the wheel!).