Eureka A Service Technicians Best Tool

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

In the Xerox business world, knowledge management represents the key to the company’s profitability and competitiveness. The case study on knowledge management at Xerox shows how crucial it is for the company not to waste its resources and fully utilize its knowledge. Moreover, the company’s strategies show that knowledge management is not only about putting information on a company’s Intranet, but ensuring that the entire information entered into the system is valid and not repetitive. The strategy is also based on the importance of motivating knowledge management sharing and creating a community atmosphere.

Xerox strives to exploit the collection of knowledge before its competitors does in order to increase both revenue and profits, streamline communication, allow people to work more effectively and efficiently, boost innovation and improve customer service. Xerox was one of the first global companies that attempted to get involved in the knowledge management process when the movement first emerged as a business strategy.

In the attempt to learn more about knowledge management and its impact on both company’s performance and customers, the company sponsored corporate and university research and studies such as partnerships with Boston University, Ernst & Young or world panel of knowledge managers. The conducted studies reflect the validity, value and potential of implementing knowledge sharing in the workplace and were embodied in two main knowledge management systems: Eureka and DocuShare. Xerox also focused on a bottom-up strategy which involved small risks and big potential gain in order to implements the knowledge management strategy with the main goal of developing new products and entry new markets.

The main purpose of these projects was to help Xerox to become a significant part of the world’s leading technologies and services in business process and document management. Moreover, the company aims at strengthening and improving their leadership in document, technology and services, through satisfying customers’ needs and expectations, delivering quality and excellence, making sure of gaining premium returns on assets and using technology to improve and maintain their actual market leadership.

Eureka: A Service Technician’s Best Tool

Eureka is a KM project that focuses on the company’s service technician’s activities performed around the world.

The Eureka process begins when a technician encounters a difficult a new problem while fixing copiers. When technicians manage to solve the problem, it is uploaded in the Eureka database using laptops that they are provided with. Furthermore, specialists from a designed department validate the solution make a further step know as "quality control" in order to make sure that the insights are credible and that not duplicates are entered in the system. This step is what differentiates the Eureka system from being just a Intranet support to being an actual KM system. After the solution is validated, it is introduced in the database and made available for technicians worldwide in the system.

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This project appeared when the company’s researchers concluded after analyzing the technicians’ daily base routines that many technicians were encountering problems that other technicians, from other regions, had already solved. As a solution to this problem, this KM system was proposed for the use of service representatives to share knowledge in a portal so that others can use the same solutions when encountering the same problems. Nowadays, Eureka comprises a huge database of validated repair tips that are shared between users. In this way, users managed to exchange information through the system and allow Xerox to track the success rate of every tip.

The success of Eureka was based on the company’s attempt to give rewards and incentives sharing knowledge and for using the contributions of others. Moreover, Eureka’s success was based on understanding the user community, its behavior and work practices, building a sharing system containing the valid information and allowing the users to manage the flow and use of information according to their best fit.

Consequently the Eureka system offers Xerox a range of advantages such as: global sharing of fixes, measurable outcomes, the potential for the data for the field technician to feed into sales or design, or the same database to be used for other 'communities' within Xerox or sold to other organizations. In some sense the whole point of the case is to prove how knowledge, which is difficult to get can be harvested into measurable, generalized forms.

The following is a list of Eureka’s positive results for Xerox:

It saves the company between 5% and 10% on labor and parts;

Annual savings total $10 million;

It holds 50,000 problem solving tips;

In 2001, it solved 350,000 problems;

In 1999, it was vote the Best KM Project in the Information Management Awards;

Inspired other KM projects – both internally and externally.

DocuShare : A Researcher’s Library

DocuShare 6.6

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DocuShare project is very similar to Eureka, but developed in order to help the researcher’s work. Instead of entering tips like the technicians do with Eureka; researchers enter what they are currently working on and any findings that are discovered. This can speed up and improve the overall research process because of the increased information that is made available. Xerox gives its researchers some freedom in entering their research data into the system because it realizes that they are adverse to structure.

This project has been spread to other departments such as Product Planning and Marketing. The KM system allows for theses departments to keep track of what employees are working on

Xerox researchers invented DocuShare as a way to overcome the frustration and inefficiency of trying to share information about their projects over multiple, incompatible computing and communication platforms. With nothing at first but word-of-mouth promotion, DocuShare grew quickly within Xerox from a handful of users in upstate New York to a global user base of more than 50,000 people. DocuShare has been available as a Xerox product since 1998.

DocuShare allows knowledge workers to use any Web browser to store, search for and manage information. The software not only gives users access to their documents. It provides summaries and thumbnail views to make it easy for people to quickly recognize and select the documents they're looking for. Most importantly, DocuShare is maintained by its users and does not require the intervention of systems administrators or IT specialists. DocuShare is available as a client application or as a software developer's kit (SDK) – a set of WebDAV client libraries that allow developers to write their own DocuShare-based applications.

Six core features turned DocuShare into an interactive community memory:

Automatic Keyword Extraction maps important key words, or lets user rate keywords manually;

Knowledge Map let users create domain- and company-specific maps of knowledge;

Awareness Service made it possible for designers to know when their colleagues were online;

Online conversation was enabled via real-time chat and email;

Automatic Relations Extraction drew connections among documents using keywords in the text while letting users manually relate documents to each other; and

View in Context displays a document along with significant information such as name/photo of document author, projects the author has worked on, and list of other documents by the author.

Conclusions

These report discuses about the importance of knowledge management in an organization like Xerox Corporation. This company had a hunch that KM would be a natural extension of documenting management. Therefore they developed a KM where employees could use to share knowledge to other. KM has become a centralized system in Xerox where employees who found a new resolution to an unknown problem would document it in KM web based portal called Eureka. So when other employees face that same issue would search the knowledge base for a solution. Due to this there was a significant cost reduction and encourages employees to use the KM.

Recommendations

Eureka and Docushare had a huge positive effect on Xerox Corporation as it has a huge community of knowledge sharing initiatives of 25,000 employees. Since it has been a success it is recommended they start it to integrate in all of its branches so that its 90,000 employees could also use it for everyday jobs as it would bring an enormous difference in customer satisfaction and financial performance.

Since KM is new culture that will spread in coming days of Xerox, it is necessary to train employees properly and prepare them for the new technology. Since 25,000 are already trained and adapted well with Eureka and Docushare, it is recommended these teams should be dispersed all over the world to various Xerox branches so that they can support the new employees in their training program.

Moreover is necessary that the supervisors should take up the roles of knowledge leaders as it’s their responsibility to coach, mentor and support their teams and other staff members. And it recommended that these leaders encourage staff to communicate freely with them if they are facing issues in training programs. It is necessary to audit knowledge for gap analysis since new change management might increase or decrease the production of work. Therefore gap analysis and SWOT analysis should be conducted regularly to audit the knowledge.

Knowledge leaders should look for knowledge need for their employees, because implementation of KM may create problems for knowledge workers who are new to this system. So identifying their problems and providing resolution for problematic situation should be done.

Finally we can say that when KM is being implemented all over the organization it is important to consider all factors like knowledge needs, knowledge gaps and using knowledge audit tools would help the company to work towards a concrete strategy to help it get into a path of success.