An Analysis of the Relationship Between Maintenance Engineering and Knowledge Management

Abstract

Knowledge is vital in everyday life, but from the viewpoint of the companies, it is a powerful intangible capital that can check the efficiency and existence of the organizations themselves. However, in industrial production environments, maintenance and exploitation activities are little studied in reference to the mechanisms of transmission of knowledge that are generated based on the difficulty of their capture, because it is fundamentally based on tacit knowledge (intrinsic fond professions operating personnel) acquired by operators for years from their work experiences in the industrial plant. These highly qualified professionals, accustomed to solve technical problems and maintain the required state of production with a high load of stress, traditionally function as islands of knowledge, and the company loses an important asset when one of them leaves. This chapter approaches the transcendence of the tacit knowledge among staff and marks the conditions for transmission as a basis for the learning of other partners of the organization.