Knowledge Management initiative in Buckman labs

2. AGENDA
 Company Profile
 Problems encountered
 Approaches
 Implementation
 Results
 Post implementation challenges
 Future challenges

3. COMPANY PROFILE
 Buckman is global, serving customers in more than
90 countries with the core business including paper
technologies, water technologies, leather
technologies and performance chemicals.
 It was founded in 1945, by Dr. Stanley Buckman,
started as one 50-gallon process vessel and five
employees.
 Now the company has become a global business
employing 1500 people around the world. Yet there
isn‘t a more nimble, adaptive, or accessible
specialty chemical solutions company on the
planet.

4. PROBLEMS ENCOUNTERED

5. PROBLEMS ENCOUNTERED
 New Leadership‘s New Ideas
 Change the management stytle from centralization to
decentralization
 Turn the company from product-driven to customer-
driven mode
 Determine what became the company‘s code of ethics
( see Exhibit 1)

6. PROBLEMS ENCOUNTERED
 Approaches to best practices
 Sending out PhDs to gather best business practices
worldwide and share with all associates in the company.
However ……
 All general managers were connected to a database
with IBM‘s network for email. However …
 Launched the first formal system , then improved……

7. PROBLEMS ENCOUNTERED
 Change for new needs:
 decided to speed up the decision-making process so
that ……
 began to think about how individual knowledge bases
could be shared and utilized so that ……
 Want to creat a network through which every
employees could be connected so that ……

8. PROBLEMS ENCOUNTERED
 Conclusion:
 All these problems faced that encourage Buckman
Labortories to implement KM …
 Next step： Action！

9. APPROACHES
 K‘Netix - The Buckman Knowledge Network
Bob Buckman established Knowledge
Transfer Department (KTD) in 1992

10. APPROACHES
 What did Bob Buckman do?
 Company‘s entire network was put on CompuServe.
 KTD built K‘Netix on CompuServe platform and their
aim was to make it user friendly.
 Every salesperson was given a leased notebook and
modem.
 Employees now had one ID and could make a single
phone call that established point-to-point link with
headquarters.
 Access to all of CompuServe‘s global information
services.

11. APPROACHES
 Forums – Heart of K‘Netix
 Heart of K‘Netix was the forums where anyone could
post a message, question and/or request for help.
 TechForum was the major forum and was open to all
employees.
 It consisted of 20 sections and each had a message
board, conference room and library section.

12. APPROACHES
 TechForum - Features & Goals
 Majority of the sections in the forums were devoted to business
areas within Buckman Laboratories and focused on helping
customers to improve their productivity.
 Few sections were dedicated to improve operational
efficiency and effectiveness of Buckman Laboratories.
 Private forums were designed for Buckman‘s core
customers to give advice tailored to their needs.
 Customer information center had all information about
each Buckman customer.

13. APPROACHES
 Creating Knowledge Base
 Systems operators (Sysops) were appointed to monitor
the discussion in forums, the content of messages and
track requests.
 They tried to get the answer within 24 hours; if not they
contacted the people directly and asked them to
respond.
 Sysops appointed two industry experts in each forum to
be primary answer givers.
 Once a topic is closed, the experts and Sysops would
decide which of these would go into the permanent
knowledge base.
 They also wrote abstracts and summary of discussion
points for each section and post the information as
summary at the end of each week.

14. IMPLEMENTATION
 The Launch of K‘Netix
 Started with a day‘s intensive hands on training
 Managers try the system and their initial negative remarks –
﹡Timelessness as they were less enthusiastic
﹡ Need for message filters
﹡Need to measure the Quality of information
 Nevertheless, Bob believed its potential as such.
 He was clear with his point on promotion of intelligent people
who do the best job of knowledge sharing.

15. IMPLEMENTATION
 Breaking the sense of hesitancy
 Emphasis on utilization :
 Freedom to communicate to everyone in line with the
code of ethics
 Flexibility in work and offering a relaxed environment
 Initial Enhancements:
 Classification of Discussion topics based on ―need to
know‖
 Multi lingual discussions with translators to encourage
the employee audience who speak more than 15
languages

16. IMPLEMENTATION
 The 4th Wave
A summit to reward 150 best knowledge sharers in
K‘Netix
 Purpose:
 Building trust in relationship
 To foster team spirit
 Realizing the change to close the knowledge gap
 Work on the ways to improve
 Identifying the change with a brainstorm
 Top cause for less participation of non US associates???
 medium of communication?
 ‗Yes‘ was the heated discussion‘s echo
 Result - Birth of multi language forums

17. RESULTS
 In 1994:
 Reported sales: $246 million
 Expenditure: $8.4 million
 Plans for 1995:
 Additional expenditure: $9.7 million

18. RESULTS
Measurements Cited in Accessing Performance
80
70
60
Percentage
50
40
30
20
10
0
Associates Product (Less Graudate
(Selling) than 5 years) Associates
1979 16 22 39
1994 65 33 72

19. POST IMPLEMENTATION CHALLENGES
 New Challenge in early 1996:
 How Buckman Laboratories competed successfully
against much bigger competitors?
 Excess capacity in the paper industry

20. POST IMPLEMENTATION CHALLENGES
 Revised Strategies:
 Emphasize ―customer intimacy‖
 Three ―key global market targets‖—paper, leather and
water (approximately 75% of current sales)
 The essence of customer intimacy was to attract
customers in the targeted segments who valued close
working relationships and the value-added benefits that
Buckman could provide.

21. POST IMPLEMENTATION CHALLENGES
 Implement New Strategies:
 By June communicated the strategy to all associates
 Developing a detailed implementation
 Revise the original mission statement
 the new mission statement: ―We will create, manufacture, and
market specialty chemicals to fulfill the needs of our customers
throughout the world. We will be leaders in the control of
microorganisms and will participate in selected markets where
our chemical, manufacturing, or marketing strengths will give
us a competitive advantage.‖

22. POST IMPLEMENTATION CHALLENGES
 ―Effectively Engaged‖ with Customers
 ―The number of people in the organization working on
the relationship with the customer relative to the total
organization will determine the momentum of the
organization.‖
 New Goal:
 By 2000 - 80% of associates ―effectively engaged‖ with the
customer
 Ultimately - ―everyone in the company should be involved with
customers in some way‖

23. POST IMPLEMENTATION CHALLENGES
 A new focus on enabling associates to expand their
knowledge:
 Building a Learning Center
 Ranging from short training courses and reference
materials to advanced academic degrees.
 Free courses, with the associate only responsible for a
passing grade.
 Stressed a change in management‘s philosophy
 As for investments in people, you need to shift from an
expense philosophy to an investment philosophy

24. FUTURE CHALLENGES
Forum
Cost of
usage after
K‘Netix
switch
Building
trust in
Virtual World

25. FUTURE CHALLENGES
 Forum usage dropped!
 Systems were developed
in-house.
 Prior to the switch, all employees
were given a detailed system‘s
manual .
 But forum usage dropped right after
switch!
 Should Buckman be worry?
↓30%

26. FUTURE CHALLENGES
 Will cost of K‘Netix increase?
 With increasing price
pressures, questions on the
cost of K‘Netix was raised.
 Does it make sense to continue
budgeting 3.5% to 4.5% of
revenues each year?

27. FUTURE CHALLENGES
 How to build trust in V-World?
 Building trust involves
 Major culture change
 Strong Persistence
 Continual cut-and-paste process
 Will the employees at Buckman
Labs willing to change?

28. QUESTIONS?