Promoting productivity in manufacturing companies in developing countries: An information system for managing and querying knowledge bases in the automotive industry in Mexico

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that a low-budget information system using knowledge bases can be developed and adopted in a manufacturing firm to improve the productivity of the organization. The automotive industry uses complex software systems to perform product engineering at all stages of the production process, from conceptual design to manufacture. For each of these stages, different software tools of great complexity are employed, and the people using these tools need constant support in order to continue being productive even when problems arise with the software they are using. Given the amount and variety of queries made by product engineering personnel to the software support staff, said staff can benefit from a software tool that stores their expertise for reuse and can be queried in order to generate quick solutions to problems with product engineering software. In this article, we describe an information system that uses these ideas related to case-based reasoning in order to flexibly and efficiently reply when problem situations are encountered by the product engineering staff of a major automobile manufacturer. This setup can relieve some of the burden placed on the software support staff and reduce their response time. The information system resulted from a collaboration between a large multinational company and our university, specifically its undergraduate computer engineering students, benefitting all parties involved in the project and helping in the development of our country, Mexico. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.