“An operative Knowledge Center will definitely make us more conspicuous and
potentially beneficial for the customer, which in its turn will add to our
competitiveness in air transportation and possibly other fields”
A. Isaykin

How to use the company experience for solving current and future problems?
How to organize an expert community and make it live and useful?
Who is collecting the company precious “knowledge honey” into the “honey cells”?
How a unified knowledge management system will instantly help to find a solution?

This is what the strategic project “The Field-Specific Knowledge Center Teaming up Best Airfreight Experts” is about. It’s a kind of advisory ‘think-tank’ which is meant to store easily accessible and reliable knowledge in the form of ‘how’ solutions.

We asked the project leaders about 2016 achievements and plans for 2017.

Anastasiya Martynova, head of analytics department, VDM, deputy project manager:
– A lot was achieved by the project team last year, and plans for 2017 are also ambitious. But I would like to say why we initiated this project. Knowledge is not about schools, universities, textbooks, postulates and dogmas covered with dust. Knowledge is about success and failure, about experience and troubleshooting. Knowledge Center is a kind of corporate Google or Wiki where you can enter a request and possibly find an elegant solution for a problem, get consulted by a company or an external expert, share your experience on troubleshooting for others not to “invent a bicycle”. Knowledge is an opportunity to be successful, to grow and help others grow. We create opportunities, and this is really worth working for.

Alexey Kukanov, IT director, VDM; project leader on “Unified Knowledge Management System”:
– Time is a nonrenewable recourse. So, wasting it on information search with no clue for its whereabouts is really annoying. Time wasted on unproductive information search is our efficiency reserve which shall be activated, especially when the company is facing hardships. So, our task is to convert technical capabilities of the IT platform into time for productive work. For now we have achieved some tangible results – the IT platform is installed and is being tested now. At the moment it is being filled with collected and fixed knowledge on the company key directions. Soon we plan to test the platform on user focus groups. Hopefully, the Unified Knowledge Management System will be in great demand with the company employees and help them preserve their main resource – time.

Julia Gordeeva, compensation and benefits manager, VDM; project leader on “The Team of Technologists”:
– We organized and trained the team of technologists who have become “the bees” collecting the company “precious knowledge honey”. They interviewed more than 220 company experts on the main processes of regular and charter transportation, aircraft maintenance, transportation management. This year we plan to train another group of technologists to address new challenging tasks. We welcome everybody to become a knowledge center technologist and join the project team!

Eleonora Surina, prevention accident department director, VDM; project leader on “Key Events”:
– Every day is eventful. There are key events which support, acknowledge or change directions and lead to results. Our task was to fix the company key events. In the scale of 25 years of the company history experts identified more than 300 of them. Event description and fixing involved different activities:
– Organizing the Contest on key event description (still ongoing);
– Initiating mini-groups;
– Interviewing experts, event witnesses;
– Collecting documents and all relevant materials.
This year we will continue on this job.

Natalia Plotnikova, project manager “Boeing and GE Logistics Knowledge”; project leader on “Team of Experts”:
– We are organizing an expert community for operational “knowledge factory” which will integrate the company intellectual assets with external expertise. The community will bring together experts of all the company businesses. This is a unique opportunity for professional and creative self-realization of the company employees, executives and external field experts.

And there is much more to what the Knowledge Center project integrates.
Global knowledge elicitation was conducted in VDA, led by Rodion Nelidov, strategic reserve program participant; in ABC, led by Fedor Novikov, the Future Leaders program participant; in VDM, led by Anastasiya Chupryna, leading economist on accounting automation; in VD Gulf and AMTES on MRO processes, led by Alexey Mikheev, deputy director VD Gulf; in transportation management, led by Timur Scherbakov, aeronautic provisions leading specialist, VDA.

More than 300 expert interviews were conducted with the results reflected in knowledge maps which will help the company employees and customers to be more successful.

The corporate Book of Recognition is being filled with articles about the people whose contribution to customer benefit was most remarkable.

Knowledge Center project is about all of us, every employee disregarding positions and geography.
It creates environment for knowledge sharing and circulation inside the company.

In conclusion, here are some words from Galina Isaykina, the Project Manager:
– It’s important for our project to have a really interested and demanding customer, the one who knows what he wants. The culture of forming an order is first of all the culture of identifying the company business needs and needs of a particular department. This is what stipulates the project success. If we – the project team – know “what”, then we will come up with any ‘how’.