Buckman Laboratories: In The Know

Buckman Laboratories Inc. brews specialty chemicals so potent even the most hardened IT manager could get a little queasy. There's Busan 1009, a microbicide used to control slime deposits in paper manufacturing. And there's Buzyme 145, a batting enzyme that strips residual hair and blood from leather.

But along with the 4,000-gallon stainless steel vessels, heating pipes and control panels used to concoct these and 400 other exotic compounds at its corporate headquarters in Memphis, Tenn., you'll find one of the most innovative knowledge management programs in the manufacturing business.

What keeps the company's 1,273 employees worldwide in the know? K'Netix, a corporate intranet that lets employees access anything from engineering and product data to news services and technical discussion groups via a simple dial-up phone connection.

"Our people are so spread out, so culturally diverse, that we had to have a way to leverage our total knowledge resources," says Robert H. Buckman, chairman of the $400 million company, which has plants in nine countries, including Singapore and Brazil.

"K'Netix lets anyone, anywhere, receive an answer to a technical question within 24 hours--no matter how complicated the question might be," he says.

Buckman started his "knowledge sharing" program about a decade ago--long before knowledge management became a pet boardroom buzzword. As far back as 1988, he recognized the need to harness knowledge. Employees were repeatedly making the same mistakes, costing the company millions of dollars in overtime.

At the same time, Buckman saw that a new kind of worker--a knowledge worker--was emerging. "Knowledge workers, unlike manufacturing workers, own the means of production," Buckman says. "They carry their knowledge in their heads and therefore can take it with them."

To capture this valuable information, Buckman formed a standard operating procedure (SOP) committee that sought to quantify and store the company's knowledge. The committee--which represented various departments such as research, production and management--met weekly to troubleshoot problems at the plant. If a chemical wasn't turning out right, the SOP committee got together and brainstormed ways to make things work. Then it documented what it had done so future problem solvers wouldn't have to go through the process again.

Ending Isolation

"Before knowledge sharing, there was isolation between departments," explains Andrew Mohler, a quality assurance manager at Buckman. "Once the departments started talking and collaborating, we found that the problems were solved a lot faster."

But the process remained tedious. It often took days, if not weeks, for the committee to solve a given manufacturing glitch--not to mention document a solution and then disseminate it to all the sites by mail or fax. To become truly responsive to its customers' needs, Buckman had to manage its knowledge resources even more efficiently.

That's where information technology offered a solution. Three years ago, the company hired CompuServe Inc. to create Chemforum, an online meeting area where Buckman employees worldwide could post questions and get answers within minutes. That meant that an answer to a manufacturing question was minutes or seconds away instead of days or weeks. Every employee was encouraged to participate in the forum, and before long, the company built a critical mass of corporate knowledge.

Nowhere was the contrast between the old and new systems more evident than on the factory floor. In pre-Chemforum days, a uniformed operator in a hard hat and safety goggles would load raw materials into a large stainless steel or glass container, consulting the written standard operating procedures as he went along the chemical mixing process. If a chemical looked wrong or didn't test properly, the operator would get on the phone and dial a supervisor, who would consult a manual or call another executive, with the calling chain continuing until the problem had been solved.

After Chemforum was installed, the operator might make the same call, but a supervisor would log onto Chemforum to solicit a solution from another manufacturing location. "In the past, it was hit or miss. Maybe you could get through to an engineer on the phone who had experienced the problem, maybe not," Mohler says. "You'd have to call all kinds of people around the world."

Today, Chemforum is just one segment of the much broader K'Netix intranet. Webmaster Alison Tucker says nine Windows NT and Lotus Notes servers support the intranet. Users access the forums and newsgroups via Microsoft Internet Explorer browsers. Most employees are issued a 120-MHz IBM ThinkPad 760ed with a 1.2 gigabyte hard drive, 32 megabytes of RAM and a removable CD-ROM drive. The notebooks are also loaded with Microsoft Office 97.

Users dial into K'Netix via CompuServe's X.25 network. A T1 frame relay connection that hangs off Buckman's Ethernet backbone network gives users access to CompuServe Information Services, which hosts the forums, technical newsgroups and news services.

Rather than storing SOP committee material on paper as it did a decade ago, Buckman has shifted the knowledge to the intranet. Using Lotus Domino, Buckman's IT staff Web-enables the SOP material so staffers can pull the documents off the K'Netix intranet. The information is stored in a Lotus Notes database. Another in-house database, called Midas, written in Microsoft Visual Basic, houses customer process information. A third database using Microsoft Access shows customer account data.

Indeed, K'Netix has morphed into a broader technology solution that delivers instant access to the collective knowledge of the entire work force--worldwide. Put differently, its intranet does more than store and share knowledge--it is something akin to a living organism that grows with the company's information needs.

"We're trying to make everything Web-accessible this time around," Tucker says. "I think as a result our people are learning more. One department can see what another one is doing--not just manufacturing, but other departments as well."

The benefits are quite visible, says George Menendez, vice president of marketing and strategic planning. "The guy out in the boondocks who only got training once every two or three years can now use computers to contact experts at the company if there's a problem with a customer," he says.

For example, a representative in Singapore was working on a process in a paper mill when one of the customer's manufacturing systems hit a snag. "They were pulling their hair out trying to solve the problem," Menendez recalls. "The representative got on the [CompuServe Information Services] forum, described the problem and asked if anyone had any ideas how he could resolve it. Within 24 hours, he got eight responses that led to the next level of thinking. They were able to resolve problem."

Linking engineering, research and marketing on a knowledge management network like Buckman's yields other unexpected rewards. Customers can be kept in the loop about when their product is being delivered, or even when it is being made.

Buckman Laboratories also is working on extranet hooks that will link its customers' inventory systems with its own, alerting both the manufacturer and the customer when chemicals need to be replenished. Training is much easier and more frequent, too, thanks to a system developed on the K'Netix network. By moving the training sessions to the knowledge sharing system, Buckman can eliminate costly quarterly trips to training centers in Belgium, Brazil and the United States.

Although the technology is impressive, keep in mind that for Buckman, knowledge management is still 80 percent management and 20 percent technology. Without the SOP meetings Buckman initiated 10 years ago, K'Netix never would have materialized.

Consultants have talked about breaking down department barriers for years. Think of knowledge management as the culmination of all the management and technical goals being bandied about today. It's not just about smarter use of E-mail or making documents a bit snappier.

Buckman Laboratories is a sound example of a company that tore down the walls between departments and built an enterprise network that delivers browser-based access to the full range of the company's information resources. And it did it in a way that offers migration to a single IP network.

Talk about being in the know.

Christopher Elliott is a free-lance journalist based in Annapolis, Md. He can be reached at chris@elliott.org.