The Company
Founded in 1911, Whirlpool is today one of the largest producer of electrical household appliances, which started to be interested in the knowledge management about three years ago.
For what concerns the company?s dimension, the group counts 500 employees, that work for Whirlpool Europe in Comerio, 6000 in Italy, 12000 in Europe and 60000 in the world.
Whirlpool?s turnover amounts to 10.3 thousand millions of dollars.

The Problems
The company needed to have a new technology of knowledge management, to permit the employees to find right information at the right moment, the executive to know his human resource, the company to work better.

Solution
The solution consists in a realization of a ?Knowledge Management System?, that, through Internet, gives all the employees the possibility to voice their options and ideas and advise new business opportunities.
The Knowledge Management System is founded on Notes/DominoR5 solution.
The clients can enter the system either with Notes or by web, across admission lists.
Notes is provided with an integrated certified procedure to avoid undesired clients.

Implementation method
The Knowledge Management System has been realized with lotus technologies, internal integration activities, professional services by IBM, such as Lotus.
First of all, the experts team realized an objective list, such as the reduction of operative times to realize the marketing plan, reduction charges for external consulting, a better human resource management.
After that, they mapped the company?s knowledge, both tacit and explicit.
The system is kept up to date monthly through qualitative instruments, like internal test, and quantitative dates, like statistics.

Key factors

To get rid of inefficient job inside the company

To create the ?Knowledge broker? figure