MAKING THE DIFFICULT LOOK EASY

Picture yourself as a new engineer, with the company only a matter of weeks. You are in a remote Amazonian jungle, wrestling with a chemical refining problem neither you nor your supervisor have ever seen before. Worse still, it’s one that is chewing rapidly into the profitability of your whole operation. Why is the process behaving like this and what on earth can you do about it?
What if you had a way to bring the whole power of your organization to bear on this problem? What if it wasn’t one engineer looking at the problem, but a dozen, scattered across the world, bringing vast reserves of knowledge, skill and experience. This is happening right now, as we speak.

Alcoa is using Knowledge Management to:

• solve problems,
• imbue new employees with already developed expertise and;
• identify and transfer best practices and new technologies faster than ever before and with far better results across space, time and culture.

Alcoa’s alumina refining division has been developing and sustaining Communities of Practice since 2004. This paper will outline the basis to our Knowledge Management program, how it has matured and some results gained. These studies demonstrate how to transfer, implement and benefit from a range of technologies and practices globally across geographical, time and cultural divides. Making the difficult look easy.