Organisational Knowledge Management for Defect Reduction and Sustainable Development in Foundries

Despite many advances in the field of casting technologies the foundry industry still incurs significant losses due to the cost of scrap and rework with adverse effects on profitability and the environment. Approaches such as Six Sigma, DoE, FMEA are used by foundries to address quality issues. However these approaches lack support to manage the heterogeneous knowledge created during process improvement activities. The proposed revision of ISO9001:2015 quality standard puts emphasis on retaining organisational knowledge and its continual use in process improvement (). In this paper a novel framework for creation, storage and reuse of product specific process knowledge is presented. The framework is reviewed taking into consideration theoretical perspectives of organisational knowledge management as well as addressing the challenges concerning its practical implementation. A knowledge repository concept is introduced to demonstrate how organisational knowledge can be effectively stored and reused for achieving continual process improvement and sustainable development.