Improvement of the Design Process through Knowledge Capitalization: an Approach by Know-how Mapping

The remark most often made about knowledge capitalization is that the tools and approaches used take a long time to implement. Today, time is of the essence and products have to be designed rapidly with simple, less determinist tools that are not only more communicative and operational but also favor collective rather than individual learning. For a number of years we have focused on designing a generic method of knowledge capitalization that would contribute to shortening the time needed to design products. We integrated three steps in our approach: identification and extraction of knowledge, modeling, and validating. We tested this approach from five different points of view which enabled us to build five specific approaches. This paper presents one of these approaches, based on the point of view of an expert in manufacturing. At each phase of the approach we propose tools and models for knowledge capitalization.