• Accelerating collaborative innovation
• Driving quality, safety and reliability
• Reducing cost of design, development and implementation
• Minimizing costly mistakes by reusing lessions learned
• Effective project management
• Collective decision making

"Engineers need a large amount of reliable knowledge when designing complex and safety critical products. Engineering knowledge in the industries in which these products are developed resides in documents, databases, Web site, design and analysis tools and humans. Reusing existing knowledge saves resources and improves product safety and quality."

- Professor Zhongzhi Shi - Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

"Many companies have tracked the amount of time spent in performing functions multiple times because they were not performed properly the first time. In manufacturing, the impact of rework on schedules and costs is obvious. Determining the cost of engineering rework is more complex, because it involves not just the direct engineering costs but also, in view of the high leverage of engineering design decisions, the resulting waste in production, marketing, and service costs. Changes made late in a project are extremely expensive both in costs and in time-to-delivery. Inadequate knowledge management is often what causes less than optimal designs to be adopted, because possible alternatives are not fully generated or considered and competing alternatives are not thoroughly evaluated.

Design rationales are difficult to capture for knowledge bases because critical decisions are often made before documentation is being assembled. Frequently, work must be repeated because no individual or institutional memory is available to explain why certain decisions were made on earlier projects."

- Extract from the article
http://www.eng.iastate.edu/iugreee/Docs/Kmwp125.pdf