Fostering continuous innovation in design based on integrated knowledge management

6. Application and qualitative evaluation

Tooling design is a knowledge-intensive process where much tacit and imprecise knowledge is held and applied by design experts [35]. In order to facilitate the innovation in tooling design, experts’ knowledge needs to be capitalized and shared for more creative usage and creation of knowledge. Our prototype has been accepted and applied in a project of tooling design in our partner company. The application is presented in the following and its initial results are evaluated qualitatively with reference to a design research approach and the criteria of evaluation in [36]. The quantitative evaluation has been planed as the object of future work.

6.1 An industrial case study

Our partner is a small and medium company who specializes in the design of progressive die for sheet metal production. As soon as a client sends an order of a sheet metal part together with its engineering documents, the company will propose a technical solution for the order, which contains a progressive die design for the part. In our application, the progressive die is chosen as our research object. Figure 12 indicates the engineering model of the part.

Figure 12 Engineering model of sheet metal part

After studying the existing design projects of similar parts, a scenario of typical die design process is proposed for designing this new progressive die. It begins with a reception of order, then the pre-study of the feasibility. And then it is followed by unfolding the part, estimating the dimensions of the die and creating the technical solution. After, with the negotiation with the client, the order could be accepted, reconsidered or refused. If it is accepted, a detailed study of the technical solution will be performed. This scenario is illustrated in figure 13.

Figure 13 Scenario of die design for sheet metal

In the application of KoSI prototype, as soon as an order from a client arrives with its technical documents, a design project and a working situation are created in the system. The die designer retrieves existing knowledge elements about similar cases from knowledge bases and pre-studies the feasibility of the new part. The available knowledge elements are visualized in a network with relation to properties of the new part. According to their relevance, some elements are selected as references for studying of feasibility of the new part in figure 14.

Figure 14 Network of selected knowledge elements

According to the existed knowledge about feasibility and designer’s experience, the new part is considered as feasible with current production facilities. This leads to further steps of unfolding the part and estimating the power and dimensions of the die. With reference to the structure of the part, a rolling feature has been noticed, which is difficult to realize and critical for the design of its die. To create the feature, two movements should be fulfilled and coordinated in order to obtain the right form. They are the vertical movement of the press and the rolling movement of the part.

According to the designer’s experience, a new neutral line is defined on the unfolded part and new forming and rolling steps are designed in order to coordinate the two movements. Thus, two new knowledge elements are created in the XML format and stored in the knowledge base, which concern the definition of a new neutral line on the unfolded part and the arrangement of forming steps as explained in figure 15-A. Meanwhile, a lot of knowledge elements are shared and provided by other team members so that useful information is available for completing the layout design of the progressive die as shown in figure 15-B.

(A) (B)

Figure 15 New and shared knowledge elements

The new knowledge elements correspond to the innovative solutions in the layout design of progressive die. The neutral line of the unfolded part is defined as the direction of band feeding and the centre line of its positioning, which ensure the continuity of the production process. The new arrangement of forming and rolling steps helps to relieve the complexity of die and to create a more balanced layout. The final innovative layout of the progressive die is illustrated in figure 16. The fourth and fifth steps in the layout innovatively resolve the quality problem of forming of the part while keeping the successiveness of production.

6.2 Qualitative evaluation

Assessing the performance of the integrated approach of KM is an important as well as a difficult task. It is partially because of the difficulty to establish the metrics to evaluate the improvements of design solutions and to assess the long term effects of implementing a KM system in a company. Thus, in order to reduce the difficulty, we perform a qualitative evaluation of our application and then plan the quantitative evaluation as future work.

In terms of the criteria of evaluation in [36], we identify three indicators for qualitatively evaluating the efficiency of our prototype in the application. The indicators are the performance of design solution, the time of development and the return of investment. According to the initial results of the application, we have qualitatively observed several benefits of our prototype system in this application, which include:

1) the automatically capturing the design expert’s working context and integrating it into the knowledge base;

2) the provision of multiple methods for the expert knowledge representation;

3) the tree mode and network mode of the visualization of knowledge elements facilitating the usage and creation of knowledge for innovation;

4) the improved traceability and trustworthiness of the knowledge elements, which lead to better decision making in design.

The prototype is currently applied by die designers in the company. With the new knowledge created and used in the progressive die design, the performance of design solution is qualitatively improved due to the continuity of the production and a more balanced layout of die. As our prototype provides convenient ways to find related knowledge and to use them in design, the time of development of the die is also significantly reduced. However, due to the long term nature of the return of investment, we can only estimate that our prototype has positive effects on this indicator.

Even though we have obtained some initial results of our application, they are far from perfect. As the evaluation system of the indicators is still not well established in our partner, more work needs to be done to quantitatively evaluate our approach. Further applications and research have been planed to continuously improve the evaluation of the application of our approach and the prototype.

Figure 16 Innovative layout of the progressive die

7. Conclusion and perspective

As innovation has been regarded as an imperative for the success of a company, how to leverage the available knowledge into real innovation in the market is the focus of our study. In order to understand the problem, KM processes, innovation models and design methods are exploited to explore the complex relationships between KM and innovation. The contribution of our work is the description of an integrated approach of KM to foster innovation in design. The approach rests on a systemic model of knowledge and a hierarchical model composed by the macro process and meta-model of KM. They provide an effective means of integrating different perspectives of KM and leveraging KM activities into innovation. And thus, it enables the designers to innovate more easily and efficiently in a knowledge-intensive and dynamic environment. With the integrated KM approach, design knowledge can be efficiently created and used and its availability is greatly enhanced so that the complexity and uncertainty of innovation are reduced.

Based on this approach of KM, a distributed knowledge management system for innovation is modelled and realized in order to relieve some disadvantages of current KM and innovation supporting systems. The prototype of our system demonstrates the functionalities and validity of the integrated approach. Finally, the application of our prototype in an innovation project of progressive die design is introduced and exhibits the applicability and feasibility of our approach to help designers to innovate.

Although substantial endeavours have been made in this study to develop the integrated approach and the prototype for fostering innovation in design, there are still several issues to be addressed in further research. Due to the time span of evaluation, only the qualitative evaluation is presented here. Practically, further applications and case studies are necessary and planed in order to fully establish the evaluation system and to quantify the indicators for more detailed evaluation of our approach. The customization of the prototype and its transition to web-based and distributed environment will be further researched.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the Chinese Scholarship Council (CSC) and our partner company for their support of our research.

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