Proceedings of the TMCE 2002, April 22-26, 2002, Wuhan, China 155 TOWARDS PRODUCT-RELATED KNOWLEDGE ASSET WAREHOUSING IN ENTERPRISES Roderick Owen Wigan Business School Wigan and Leigh College The United Kingdom R.Owen@wigan-leigh.ac.uk Imre Horváth Department of Design Engineering Delft University of Technology The Netherlands i.horvath@io.tudelft.nl ABSTRACT Although the concept of knowledge asset management is known for years, there are almost no methodologies that can help its implementation in companies. Even if we are focusing only on product related knowledge assets, we face the problems associated with the diversity of products and companies, and ambiguity and complexity of knowledge. This paper presents a framework methodology that specifies the main actions to be taken by companies to use product-related knowledge as asset. The methodology involves identification of the product-internal and product- external knowledge as well as the decomposition of them to manageable units of knowledge. The paper proposes multi-layer multi-representation ontology for high-level formalization of various units of product-internal knowledge. The ontology arranges the units of knowledge in hierarchical layers and domains, and re-establishes the interrelationships and contextual dependencies amongst them by links. The applicable forms of representation are also discussed. The methodological framework can be applied to structuring and representation of product external knowledge. KEYWORDS Knowledge assets, product-internal knowledge, product-external knowledge, multi-layer ontology, multi-modal representation, warehousing 1. INTRODUCTION Time to market and immediacy has become the driver of today’s economy, where the primary objective must be to increase competitive advantage by reducing the time needed for problem solving and decision-making to a minimum. The strategic objective must be to improve the financial bottom line to ensure long- term survival of the enterprise, and as such in the face of global market competition and the globalization of operations, has necessitated the companies to make maximum use of the available knowledge. By now, they have been unconsciously shifting their strategic thinking from tangible to intangible assets, all this in the wake of mass globalization and the birth of the virtual organization where manufacturing economies have given way to service economies. 1.1. Setting the stage The recognition of the demands on knowledge management has stimulated extensive academic research and resulted in a new way of thinking about product-related knowledge and other corporate knowledge as well as about utilization in globally competitive operations. A new philosophy has been brought into the management arena, which is often referred to as knowledge asset management or corporate knowledge warehousing. Although most of the companies recognized the need for knowledge asset management at corporate level, experiences show that many of them are not aware of the practical methods needed to realize the philosophy.