Technology As Innovator

Simply Wiki

Wiki is a platform that allow anyone to quickly edit web pages. Repeat after me: anyone & quick.

I doubt that you don’t know Wikipedia. Yes, it is the most successful Wiki instance today.

To know more of Wiki, please see the following video:

Potential problems with Wikis

Disorder

The fact that information can be quickly edited by anyone is the primary reason why wikis grow like weeds instead of carefully tended gardens.

Large scale wikis become chaotic and disorganized

Multiple collaboration means no one owns anything — organization comes from someone having a vested interest to organize and maintain.

Information is hard to navigate consistently because there is no unifying vision to the structure.

Large scale wikis turn into a flat hierarchy of documents with no hierarchy.

Information transfer

It is hard to import information into a wiki from other sources.

It is hard to export information out of wikis (eg: RSS feeds).

5 ways to build effective Wikis

1. Make it Search-intelligent

Make URLs human-readable permalinks

Navigation clues

2. Manage Version Control

Version control for every change

Rollbacks of edits

Notifications, watch lists and logs

Discussions of changes

3. Enable Information Management

Refactor and maintain information

Document management: attachments (documents, images, media…) should be treated the same as pages when it comes to search and version control.

Provide import/export functionalities to standard-compliant format (XML).

4. Build an Organization that best supports

Wikis are not built to be used in top-down organizational hierarchy. However, all-are-equal model lurks serious problems. Click here to read more of the story…

We shall see if Larry Sanger’s experiment of Citizendium will make it more effective.

5. Develop a Process

Building Wikis is one activity of knowledge management. Knowledge management process should be developed, especially in tightly-organized groups, to support this.

Conclusion

Wikis are effective if built and managed the right way, and let’s.

5. Advanced Planning and Scheduling

5.1. Definition

Manufacturing management process
that allocates
raw materials and production capacity
optimally
to meet demand.

5.2. APS Characteristics

How APS is different from traditional planning:

The 2 diagrams concludes: APS process is simultaneous, thus is more scalable and optimal and usually gives more accurate results.

The cycles of APS allow throughput times and inventory to be reduced.

APS is often built on finite capacity scheduling.

5.3. When to apply APS

1. Make-To-Order (as distinct from make-to-stock) manufacturing
2. Capital-intensive production processes, where plant capacity is constrained
3. Products ‘competing’ for plant capacity: where many different products are produced in each facility
4. Products that require a large number of components or manufacturing tasks
5. Production necessitates frequent schedule changes which can not be predicted before the event

5.4. APS & ERP Integration

The end result of APS: the Schedule is passed to Sales/Customer Service. Together with Orders, this Schedule is then input to ERP.

ERP Series Previous Posts

ERP Series vol 3: CRM

ERP Series vol 2: ERP System Characteristics

ERP Series vol 1: ERP Definition & Advantages

Free & Open Source Enterprise Resource Planning Software