IT Helps Streamline R&D Process

Computerworld - Inside consumer products giant Procter & Gamble's global R&D facilities, engineers and biologists concoct new and better ways to do laundry, keep teeth white and gulp down more snack foods. Although 40% of P&G's 18,000 R&D staffers are in Cincinnati, the rest are in Asia, Europe and Latin America. The variety of engineering, patent and product research talent is so dispersed that it's difficult to know who the resident experts in particular fields are and where they might be located.
Organizing all that knowledge and experience and making it accessible and easy to share help the company's operations immensely, according to Mike Telljohann, associate director of global R&D computing at P&G.
Telljohann set out to replace a P&G topic-based bulletin board that had fallen into disuse. "There were so many different types of entries that it was cumbersome," he recalls.
Portal technology helped remove those complex barriers. Using software from AskMe Corp., Telljohann created a place where P&G users could post established knowledge, examples of past work and even individual biographies. That means a researcher in Caracas can now find someone in the Beijing R&D center who has expertise on a common problem.
"We needed a way to capture documented knowledge," says Telljohann, noting that researchers were being asked similar questions repeatedly.
"A researcher in Kobe, Japan, asked about an analytical instrument for a chemical compound," he says. "It turned out someone in Cincinnati had purchased one a year ago with good results." That knowledge wouldn't have been shared so easily before the portal.
Today Telljohann runs two data repositories, one for people, the other for subject-matter expertise; currently there are 900 registered experts.
"It captures conversations in question-and-answer format in a dialog database," he explains. "When you look for a topic, it brings up the people as well as prior exchanges."
Dubbed Innovation Net, the intranet lets users set up subject categories and relieves experts from repeating answers.
The AskMe system is integrated into P&G's Lotus Notes e-mail client. "Installed out of the box, it alerts experts via e-mail that a question has been asked," says Telljohann. "There's also a way for people to monitor conversations without getting involved; we call that the observer role."
Of the 7,000 P&G users who have tried the portal, more than 5,000 are repeat users, underscoring its success.
With the system growing by one to two experts and 20 to 30 users per day, maybe someday they'll perfect self-folding laundry.
Pimm Fox is a freelance writer in San Francisco. Contact him at pimmfox@pacbell.net.

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