Knowledge management
Today, knowledge management comprises a wide range of solutions. These solutions take different approaches, in terms of design, organization and technology. Their aim, however, is to gather together all the knowledge available in the company and make it available to the company's employees and business processes to help them do their jobs. With its ELO product family, ELO Digital Office offers a range of solution components and concepts.
Recording and integrating information
Knowledge only becomes valuable and useful if it can be made available, in the right context. In general, this is the first difficult hurdle to overcome in such systems. Knowledge and information is not just stored at many different locations in a company, it is also all too often managed in isolation in each location. The many different systems and media used for data and document formats make it even more difficult to obtain an overview of all the information that is available. The first step, therefore, is to introduce refined solution components and concepts that connect the individual islands of information, pooling them together into a common information repository.
The ideal platform for this task is a powerful archive and content management system. Firstly, such a system has powerful interfaces and import functions that allow it to connect to various systems such as ERP, e-mail, databases, CAD, etc. Secondly, it must also be able to manage very large amounts of data, possibly into the terabytes, over many years without losing performance. The magic word in all of this is "knowledge automation". This technology allows the massive amounts of information and documents to first be processed and transferred to an archiving and content management system. This service is provided by automation components in the ELO product family, such as the XML Importer. The XML Importer imports any available structured information into a generalized standard format. The data sources can comprise spooled files or any other application. There are already connections available for many applications. The task becomes more difficult, however, in the case of unstructured data. Fixed rules or logic-based procedures simply cannot work here. So ELO has added product components that use new technologies, such as the self-teaching ELOprofessional Doc-Ixtractor. This component is able to analyse document content intelligently. This reduces the high level of manual work that is needed to classify and correctly allocation the information these documents contain. Especially in the case of large quantities of data, manual processing is totally unfeasible for reasons of cost. When importing the information, documents also usually undergo a format conversion too, as many data formats are simply unsuitable for effective information processing. The ELO products provide a range of processing components to convert existing data formats into the required target formats. Examples of these components are the numerous text filters, components to automatically extract text from HTML pages and thumbnail conversion. Information must be able to be processed in subsequent processes as a separate entity. This requires automated mechanisms for format conversion, as provided by the ELO products.
Information processing and visualisation
Once the process of gathering together and pooling all required information content has been completed, the next step is to make the compressed knowledge available. The availability of knowledge also entails many different issues: In one case, a process is supplied with detailed information that is gathered from databases, ERP systems, etc. This is intended to control an existing business process through to a successful conclusion. While the variations of this data may be numerous, they all usually demonstrate structured demands, such as selection criteria, the ability to evaluate the data and clearly assign it during each stage of the process. A typical example of this is checking the plausibility of data in the automated processing of a process chain. The system may have to check, for example, if a specific recognized event is plausible in respect of the information content that has been provided. The overriding aim of this is to improve the quality of the process. In order to implement this in practice, the required components from the ELO product family such as Workflow and ELO DocXtractor should be used. These must then be connected and configured in accordance with the task at hand and the underlying business context. Another case may concentrate primarily on the visualization of information. In order to ensure they can work effectively, users need to be able to view dynamic, up-to-date information and events. If a salesman is preparing to visit a customer, he needs the current status and precise knowledge of that customer - both in terms of the order and delivery, and of any problems, ongoing support issues and any other events. ELO can provide him with this information using dynamic folders, for the specific context and events in which he is interested, all displayed through differently coloured, selectable objects.
Free information search
If problems occur when managing tasks or realizing projects, it is advisable to investigate the underlying events, background knowledge and documents. This is a classic research task, which can often be very time consuming. A DMS solution such as ELO can help in this instance, providing a broad range of search tools. ELO stores subject-based information in a structured storage system that can be searched much like a library. In addition, classification and keyword definition functions allow users to work with targeted category terms. This aspect of information research requires a high level of efficiency, as the operator can quickly reach his goal by working in a structured way. Finally, information content can also be located in ELO using a full-text search tool. This allows users to search for words and phrases in document content, highlighting the located terms in the resulting hit lists. When dealing with very large amounts of data, however, it is easy to lose an overview. The number of documents located may be too large, and the user is forced to further restrict the hit list. A further improvement is provided by the ELO Associative Search module. This allows users to locate information content that is associated with the search term. It also allows searches to be undertaken using a content-based text or phrase. A section of text is used to inform the system of the topic area in which information is to be located. Using the neural network structure, the user has an intelligent search engine at his disposal that returns extremely accurate results at an astonishing rate. The entire ELO search functionality can be enhanced by the addition of a thesaurus. This function means that a query submitted in German can also return English material, for example.