Objective

In small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in particular, the knowledge of important business processes that is critical to success is often spread across just a few shoulders, the so-called core competence carriers (CCT). Securing and passing on this procedural knowledge poses challenges for SMEs and causes additional work for the KKT. The KIproWork research project therefore aims to enable SMEs to permanently anchor existing knowledge about processes in the company, distribute it as needed, and use it more efficiently. On the one hand, this is intended to strengthen competitiveness in the face of demographic change, digitization and the ongoing shortage of skilled workers, and on the other hand to sustainably promote competence development and cross-divisional collaboration in SMEs.

Procedure

Building on the documentation software FlowShare, KIproWork develops, tests and evaluates a generically applicable solution for the work-integrated, automated documentation of procedural knowledge of KKT. In addition, KIproWork is concerned with the conception of tools for the (AI-supported) integration of this knowledge into existing structures of knowledge preservation and for work-integrated knowledge provision. The project places special emphasis on the involvement and integration of future users in order to improve the working situation of KKT and non-process users in the sense of a human-centered, acceptance-promoting technology introduction. In order to support SMEs in the selection of suitable use cases, KIproWork is also developing an approach to enable managers to independently identify relevant KKT in their respective companies. The central research results and findings from KIproWork will be made available online to interested SMEs in the form of a method case.

Project duration

August 2022 until July 2024

Project consortium

Technology partner and project coordinator: miraminds GmbH

Research partner: Institute for Learning and Innovation in Networks, Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences

Application partner: Eisenwerk Würth GmbH

Collaborators

• Prof. Dr. Steffen Kinkel
• Marco Baumgartner
• Elena Stolz
• Ina Schiedermair
• Tobias Kopp

Project website

https://getflowshare.com/de/kiprowork/

This Research and Development Project is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in the program "Future of Value Creation - Research on Manufacturing, Services and Information Work" (funding code: 02L19C250) and supervised by the Project Management Agency Karlsruhe (PTKA). The responsibility for the content of this publication lies with the author.