In Larsen & Toubro the need for the Knowledge Management system emerged when DHDS (Dehydrogenation Desulphurization) projects were being executed at different locations across India in the year 1999-2000. Though all projects were similar in nature, the problems encountered were similar, yet the performance of the projects were different.
Hence, emphasis on having a structured and systematic approach for sharing of the Project learnings and Best Practices and recommendations for the future to avoid repeated mistakes.
Knowledge Management was thus identified as one of the Thrust Areas by Mr. K. Venkatramanan, our President Operations & Member of Board, for achieving E&C objectives of growth.
It was one of the major Business Specific Initiatives (BSI) undertaken in the E&C Division of L&T, meant to harness the knowledge and experience of its people.
A roadmap for implementing KM with specific reference to E&C business was made after much deliberations and inputs from various sources including research papers, presentations by Gartner and Boston Consultancy Group.
To therefore translate the KM roadmap into reality many initiatives were taken up which can be broadly classified into Hard & Soft initiatives.
IT infrastructure, selection of the technology platform, formation of team from the business as well as IT to translate the KM requirement into software program were some of the Hard initiatives undertaken.
Soft Initiatives included handling the culture building, involving senior management to mentor KM initiative, designing the recognition system for rewarding the employees, conducting various promotional activities like making presentation at different levels, organizing poster campaigns etc.
In the year 2000 a Core Group was set up to prepare Road Map for KM. The core group comprised of Steering team of senior management, Functional Champions from Business Units and members from HR & IT for support.
A comprehensive KM system (KnowNet) with initial focus on capturing Learning) was conceptualized and designed in-house on IBM Lotus domino platform (ver 4.5 ) and formally launched on 5th June 2001 by President Operations & Member of Board Mr. K. Venkataramanan.
On 24th Nov 2009, KnowNet 2.0 was launched with MOSS 2007 as technology platform incorporating features of web 2.0.
It may be noted that KnowNet 2.0 signifies the second generation of knowledge management in E&C Division as it facilitates the interactive information sharing thus improving the collaboration in contrast to earlier version of KM where users were limited to the passive viewing of content that was created for them.
Starting with KnowLedge Online, KOL as it is popularly known in E&C is a repository of project specific & proposal learnings in which the employees have instant access to centralized information for knowledge sharing about project guidelines, common practices, procedures, etc. It contains more than 5000 learning from various projects collected over last 10 years.
The key feature includes blogs, wikis, unstructured learning, dashboard for user and approvers, advance search feature and linkage to E&C Divisions Intranet home page.
DocNet- E&C Division’s Project Collaboration Central Project Document Library
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Automated Reports Engineering Progress Monitoring Dashboard |
DocNet is an End to end solution for managing Engineering drawings and other Project documents. It is a web based Solution accessed over the internet/intranet using internet explorer .It is built on MOSS 2007 technology .
It Leverages the out of the box features like centralized repositories for storing, managing, and accessing documents in more effective way.
DocNet is an End to end solution for managing Engineering drawings and other Project documents. It is a web based Solution accessed over the internet/intranet using internet explorer.
It Leverages the out of the box features like centralized repositories for storing, managing, and accessing documents in more effective way.
DocNet is an End to end solution which supports various phases of the project starting from Pre bid, Post award of the project ,during engineering, execution and final handover of the documents through various features customized over the time.
During the Pre bid stage Project specific Internet enabled websites are created through which the team members exchanges documents via INTERNET with the vendors, PMC & Client.
During the Post Bid stage it acts as Central Document Repository across Engineering & Project Management.
During the Engineering phase the entire progress monitoring & automated reporting is managed by Progress monitoring & reporting tool.
During Execution It summarizes the entire progress in terms of the payments, status with the PMC, Look ahead & Backlog schedules etc.
And finally for Project dossier submission the feature for bulk downloading the documents in a structured way is provided in the system.
