Keywords

1 Introduction

Knowledge is a key resource for companies but how to find and leverage the knowledge within the company and the staff is a problem. Under the background of Industrial 4.0, companies pay lots efforts to build Smart Factory to provide assistance to people and machines to execute tasks [1, 2]. This is achieved by systems taking considerations of context aware information. Corporations in software engineering or consulting have developed knowledge management systems to share experience among teams in an organization. But as far as we know few study investigates the knowledge management systems to the blue-collar worker, especially maintenance workers, and maintenance companies are in desperate need of knowledge management systems.

Take the elevator industry as an example, by the end of 2014, total number of elevators in China reaches 3.6 million, ranking first in the world and grows with the speed of 20 % annually [3]. However, due to the lack of effective maintenance, elevator entrapment failure and fatal accidents occur frequently. For example, on average forty trapped people are rescued in elevators in Guangzhou city every day [3]. At the same time, elevator companies experience a serious shortage of elevator maintenance workers, especially the experienced ones. The inadequacy of individual experience not only reduces the maintenance efficiency but also threatens the safety of workers. Influenced by the nomadic property of maintenance work (i.e. workers go to various equipment locations to complete repair missions with one partner) and the educational level of the workers, knowledge management is a big problem for maintenance workers.

The web-based community provide good directions for the companies’ knowledge management [4, 5]. Moreover, the development of mobile internet and the popularity of smart phones promote the applications of social networks used during the work. The paper aims to explore the nature of maintenance work and provide directions for the design of the maintenance knowledge management application for maintenance workers.

2 Literature Review

2.1 Maintenance Work and Maintenance Knowledge

Maintenance ensures proper operations and keep the product’ life cycle down through regularly maintenance interventions (corrective, preventive, conditions based, etc.) [4]. Intervention measures depend on the model and the condition of maintenance equipment, which puts forward high requests to maintenance workers’ skills. Waeyenbergh and Pintelon [4] proposed that the maintenance knowledge (know-how) was acquired through work itself rather than books. Maintenance workers need to reach the locations of equipment to be repaired. Sharing knowledge and learning from each other become difficult for geographically dispersed workers.

In conclusion, user-centered product design needs to consider the characteristics of nomadic maintenance work to better develop the experience sharing application.

2.2 Factors Effect Knowledge Management

The design of knowledge management application will be affected by various factor. De Long and Fehey [8] pointed out that “Investment in information technology would not change the culture by itself.” Thus, knowledge management must align with culture norms of the company if they are to be achieved. Companies’ culture norms dictate and distinguish the knowledge belongs to organization or individual, we need to understand the culture of organization before knowledge management.

Besides, characteristics of web systems determine the effect of knowledge management. The collaborative learning systems can be generally categorized into two types: Wiki and Community Question Answering (CQA) system. Wiki is an editable website allow people to build up knowledge collaboratively [9] and considered as one of best examples of collective intelligence and a structured way to record knowledge, but most experience of maintenance workers are unstructured. Cole [10] has described a failed experiment to use Wiki technology in higher education for not considering the actual condition of target users, so Wiki may not be a good tool for maintenance workers to share experiences. On the contrary, CQA system is a service where people can ask questions and share knowledge by providing answers to questions asked by other users [10] and Srba and Bieliková [11] described an potential of CQA systems to be applied in educational environment. Thus CQA systems are suitable to answer subjective, non-factual and context-aware queries which might be more suitable for experience sharing. Moreover, users’ knowledge acquisition scenarios of should be combined with the system design [11]. It is important to explore the character of users and using scenarios before the knowledge management application development.

The main goal of this paper is to explore the design of experience sharing application for elevator maintenance workers, specifically the nature of maintenance work and potential use scenarios of systems. With the help of the smart phone application, maintenance companies could effectively manage maintenance knowledge to improve workers’ expertise and guarantee their job safety.

3 Methodology

This study used the observation method and the focus group interviews to understand the the characteristics of the elevator maintenance work. The observation method was conducted to understand maintenance workers’ workflow and tools during the work. Since workers with different expertise may have different experience in knowledge management, the focus groups interviews were carried out for the experienced workers’ group and the new coming workers’ group separately to gain their idea.

3.1 Participants

Six elevator maintenance workers (male) were recruited and classified into two groups according to their level of expertise in elevator maintenance. Three younger workers (ages 28–30) who had less than five-year experience were assigned in the new coming workers group. Three experienced workers (ages 43–49) who had more than twenty-year experience were assigned in the experienced workers group. Participants are from the same elevator company. Since most elevator maintenance workers were male, this study just invited male workers.

3.2 Procedure

The experiment was conducted in the Training Building of the elevator company. First, the on-site work observation was at the elevator machine room. One experienced worker (29-year experience) demonstrated the basic maintenance process of elevator machine room and introduced the tools used during the work. Two instructors observed the whole maintenance process and asked questions when they did not understand. The whole process was recorded by video camera.

Second, the focus interview was conducted for two groups separately in meeting room and the whole process was recorded by the voice recorder. Two instructors interviewed maintenance workers in three aspects:

  1. 1.

    work condition (e.g., “Can you describe your typical working day?”; “How the maintenance work is allocated?”; “How is your workload?”; “What tools are used during the work?”; “How often do you see your co-workers and in what ways?”; “How do you get in touch with your co-workers?”);

  2. 2.

    maintenance knowledge and knowledge management (e.g., “What is the training procedure?”; “Describe your experience in being a master or an apprentice.” “How do you solve your problems encountered during the work”’; “Do you have experience in asking co-workers for help and how often do this kind of things happen?” “Will you share your experience in solving problems to others and how?”)

  3. 3.

    attitude toward the experience sharing application (e.g., “What do you usually use your smart phone for?”; “What is your attitude toward experience sharing among workers?”, “What do you think if there is an experience sharing application that could help you share experience or learn something?”).

4 Results

From the on-site observation and focus interview, this study gained some insights into the nature of nomadic maintenance and maintenance workers’ characteristic. This study organized our findings in the following sections:

4.1 Nature of Nomadic Maintenance Work

Different from office staff work in the office, the maintenance workers went to around four designed locations to complete their repair missions everyday. Besides, the work was planned to carry out regularly alone or with a partner. This nomadic characteristic of maintenance work made it hard for workers to communicate face-to-face. Thus smart phone became an important tool to their work. All of them had smart phones and had habits in using social applications.

In the management level, the maintenance workers were organized in teams (around nine workers) which were responsible for regional elevator maintenance work. In each team, tasks were assigned by the team leader through smart phones. Workers used the instant message, like We-Chat (Chinese popular mobile text and voice messaging communication service), for communication. Besides, workers’ hands were full of oil when they were working, so voice messaging of We-Chat made communications easier. They also needed instant message to send pictures to the team leader if they need to order parts.

If a part of the elevator is broken, I need to send the leader the photo of the part by We-Chat to order it. We also have the We-Chat group for group communicate. But too many people are in it, and it is hard to find the history message or get the feedback immediately. (29, 3-year experience)

Maintenance workers used phone calls and social applications for work communicate, and it was the only way for them to contact to the outside.

4.2 Maintenance Knowledge

Because maintenance workers were exposed to dangerous conditions during repair work, workers wore professional cloth with a bag of professional equipment and the maintenance work follows standard procedures. The rules of the maintenance work were that problem solving went first and followed the regular inspection routine. The experience was precious and extremely useful in troubleshooting, because problems were various, which needed the workers knew a wide range models of machine. Moreover, workers needed to use sensory perception such as visual check, sound listening and the sense of touch to diagnose troubles. Aristotle (1978) suggested experience emanated from sensory perception. This kind experience was hard to explain. The maintenance knowledge was accumulated during practical working, so the longer the worker worked, the more experienced the workers were. Due to the nomadic characteristics of maintenance work, it was hard to share their own experience to others by traditional communication.

4.3 Current Knowledge Sharing Mechanism

As with most blue-collar workers, new coming workers learned most skills during the apprenticeship. The new comer would work with the experienced master who was in the same organization for some time and after that he needed to work alone. The diagnostic process and competence of maintenance was experience-guided [15]. With limited experience, new comers spent more time to complete the task and sometimes called others for help when they worked alone. Two expertise groups had different attitudes in knowledge sharing. New comers mentioned following words about asking for help:

I prefer to solve problems myself, which made me proud of myself. If I can not solve problems, I will call experienced peers for help first and then the senior workers because I do not want to loose my face in front of the master. (30, 2-year experience)

New comers preferred to solve problems alone but they do not have much choice to learn from each other. Phone calls or instant message (like We-Chat) were main ways for experience exchanging. For experienced maintenance workers, they felt pleased to help others. However, the experience sharing process was a disturbance to the experienced workers’ work. One participant expressed his experience in helping others:

I usually answer workers’ phone calls. Just yesterday, a young worker called me for help. After his description, I told him the solution immediately. And after solving it, he called back again to praise me and thank to me, but I do not have much time to talk to him. I was working as well. (47, 25-year experience)

The ability to help others is the reflection of one’s knowledge and workers are proud of their skills. Even the experienced workers would also ask workers who is senior to them for help.

I have been in maintenance industry for more than 20 years and I still need to ask the senior workers who are older than me for help if I can not solve the problem. It is common in our industry. (43, 23-year experience)

This dedicated that all the maintenance workers had the requirement for asking questions and sharing experience to share. Current ways could only share knowledge within a small scope and this process could not be recorded.

5 Discussion

During the interview, workers showed positive attitude toward the concept of smart phone application which could manage maintenance knowledge. Young workers advised “the application should help learn some experience” (28, 1 year-experience). Also, experienced workers suggested that “workers could share experience on the application and search for certain question on it” (49, 29 year-experience). Therefore, the experience sharing application should take advantage of the CQA system to manage workers experience and provide context-aware assistance to workers. Workers could ask questions, share experience and search for problems on this application.

Potential use cases are generated from the knowledge sharing problems faced by maintenance workers. The use cases can be categorized into four kinds: (1) search and ask question; (2) remote assistance by answering other questions or sharing experience; (3) capture experience by others’ sharing; (4) connect intra-organizational wide workers. In this way workers could try to solve problems by themselves with this mobile database. The application could reduce experienced workers’ workload to answer same questions over and over again, and provide new comers good learning opportunities. New comers could capture the experience besides on-site working with the mentor. What’s more, this platform could connect the intra-organizational maintenance workers. The design guidelines on the design of maintenance knowledge management application are summarized in the Table 1.

Table 1. Design guidelines for the maintenance knowledge management application
Full size table

The experience sharing application is to design to manage organizational wide knowledge, so the norm of the industry or company must be considered during the application design. Current training mechanism (i.e., newcomers learn skills by following the master) of maintenance workers cultivates their willingness to share their knowledge. Then this norm will influence users’ behavior in online community [12]. Moving experience sharing process to the smart phone application not only improves the efficiency but also guarantees workers’ job safety by avoiding disturbances. Moreover, the usage of technology needs to support the pre-existing behavior of the users [10]. The nomadic nature of maintenance work makes social applications a necessary tool during the work, so the smart phone application used under experience-sharing context would be useful. The application could connect the geographically dispersed maintenance workers, but different from instant message, this application aims to exchange professional knowledge and all the records would be well stored and easily retrieved.

6 Conclusion

This study explores the design of experience sharing application for elevator maintenance workers. Results indicate that the application should take advantage of the CQA system and the potential use cases include “Search”, “Support”, “Connect” and “Discover”.

Besides, the current training mechanism and nomadic property of the maintenance are found contribute to the application usage. Further studies can be done to design the interface and detailed functions of the experience sharing application and test the usability of the application.