Improving Product Development Process & Quality using Electronic Checklists - A case study

Abstract

Knowledge has been an important asset for organizations. To be successful, organizations should manage their organization knowledge efficiently. An important part of organizational knowledge lies as “experience” in tacit form. Especially in engineering companies, that tacit knowledge could be much valuable to discard. A company can only benefit from that tacit knowledge by converting it to some “transferrable form”. Kokkoniemi uses “experience knowledge” for the knowledge that is sourced from experience in company’s operations and captured in some medium. The level that a company collects and utilizes its experience knowledge has an important effect on its success. Checklists are considered to be good options for capturing and packaging experience in software and engineering companies. In this master thesis, we aim to show how experience knowledge can be collected and managed by using checklist. To conduct our research, an electronic checklist system has been developed and evaluated in an engineering company, Sweden.