Ricky's Cleaning Case Study

Ricky’s Cleaning

Ricky’s Cleaning is a private company that provides cleaning services to its clients. The company serves both office and domestic needs. The managing board has plans to enter into industrial cleaning services. The company is located at the heart of a busy town and employs some of the best cleaning professionals in the area, specializing in stain removal from carpets, mold removal, drainage systems, and other facilities that improve the experience of a home or office. Despite the company’s huge success in service provision, some customers complain about certain workers having performed below expectation. The company’s management, on conducting a survey among the employees, seeks to create a knowledge management system to centralize the processes and procedures of services the company offers. This repository will help to reduce the number of complaints from customers.

Expert Knowledge Management System

An expert system is a software with repositories created from knowledge from highly qualified professionals, which is meant to provide assistance in service provision in repetitive tasks (Zhang & Venkatesh, 2017). In the 21st century, expert systems are built with artificial intelligence and have the ability to learn in unsupervised or supervised manners, based on observation of the manipulation of variables or from knowledge fed by professionals. Expert systems are mainly found in the stock exchange markets where software products provide near-accurate predictions of the market movements based on certain rules derived from years of experience dealing in the business. In the recent past, some hospitals have adopted computer-assisted diagnosis, which speeds up the treatment process.

Content Management Systems

A content management system controls the protocols related to the utilization of a particular set of information. It provides a mechanism for experts on particular subjects or areas to create content that is to be accessed in future as reference by other less authoritative individuals on the same issue (Rosenkranz, Seidel, Mendling, Schaefermeyer, & Recker, 2009). For instance, in a job involving greasy stain removal from a carpet, the order of application of chemicals and the soaking duration may be crucial to the process. However, only experts are able to understand it. Therefore, in order to streamline the process, other professionals may be encouraged to seek this knowledge from such systems in order to achieve excellence in service delivery.

A Knowledge Management System for Ricky’s Cleaning

Ricky’s Cleaning has been successful in the provision of services in the five years of its existence. However, the company has lost its expert staff due to retirement, demise, turnover, and other causes. The human resource has been difficult to replace. In implementing a knowledge management system, the company will benefit from its staff by retaining their expertise though the centralized repository controlled by a content management system. An expert system may be developed to provide automated complaints logging and alert for certain individuals with high rates of success in service provision, after which a content management system may be used to log the procedure followed in completing the job. Various iterations may be unified by a supervisor or manager to constitute a verified knowledge management platform for the company.

Social Media Integration

Ricky’s cleaning may use its knowledge management repository to enhance service provision by open sourcing a part of it for public consumption, to be used in resolving certain minor problems for clients. This could be done by sharing links and blog posts on the social media platforms. It would create a marketing solution for the company as the knowledge could spread easily by customers sharing with their friends. In addition, the company could gain extra knowledge from the public with regards to the feedback it gets from customers and readers on the social networking platforms, thus creating a knowledge ecosystem for itself.

References

Rosenkranz, C., Seidel, S., Mendling, J., Schaefermeyer, M., & Recker, J. (2009). Towards a Framework for Business Process Standardization. International Conference on Business Process Management.

43, pp. 53-63. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

Zhang, X., & Venkatesh, V. (2017). A Nomological Network of Knowledge Management System Use: Antecedents And Consequences. MIS Quarterly, 41(4), 1275-1306.