Knowledge Creation at Manufacturing Sites by Utilizing SECI Models

Abstract

In recent years, there is a strong need to reconstruct a new “ Genbaryoku (problem finding and solving capabilities at the manufacturing site)”. It is to digitize and systematize high-quality data at the manufacturing site and knowledge of individuals depending on their ability, and to systematize them into knowledge assets. For that purpose, it is necessary to change the work process information at the manufacturing site from tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge, and to accumulate explicit knowledge as a shared database. Furthermore, the explicit knowledge is required to be able to be used as information to generate new explicit knowledge by using LEAN, SixSigma, and VE. And it is necessary that the newly created explicit knowledge can be transformed into explicit knowledge that workers at the manufacturing site can easily understand. In this research, we propose a method to convert work process information from tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge on the premise of applying SECI model. Its validity is evaluated and verified by case studies in which different types of manufacturing methods were tried. Furthermore, it was confirmed that the productivity improves due to the spiral-up effect of the SECI model when the transformed explicit knowledge is used.