Specifying a knowledge management system for the Concurrent Engineering Laboratory (NuPES)

This paper presents some considerations in the specification of a knowledge management system for the Concurrent Engineering Laboratory-NuPES, an academic research group, which develops products in partnership with the Brazilian branch of Siemens Telecommunications. NuPES uses multifunctional teams (MT) organization to simulate electronic systems. A high turn-over is observed due to an expressive number of trainees in its staff In this context, it is difficult to capitalize knowledge developed in preceding projects. Especially in MT, a great amount of knowledge is shared in the groups' practices that are not usually considered in KM commercial solutions. We propose to determine a collective knowledge model for NuPES through a methodology focused on activity and then use it as a guideline to identify the most appropriate software tools to manage its collective knowledge. NuPES characteristics, the proposed methodology and initial working considerations are presented here.