Ares announces achievements in knowledge management service

Ares International Corp. announced its achievements in its knowledge management (KM) service in a press conference on January 16, 2007, with best practice company King's Resort & Spa sharing its success in KM promotion at the event.

Since 2003, the Small and Medium Enterprise Administration (SMEA) of Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) has been promoting the KM consultancy engineering for Taiwan’s small and medium enterprises (SMEs), with Ares handling the “KM Plan for Small and Medium Enterprise”, offering free KM diagnosis evaluation, KM introduction consultancy, international enterprise KM trends and concepts, and launching KM application experience sharing for SMEs.

For more than four years, more than 500 SMEs have received diagnosis and evaluation for KM, with 57 SME best practices from various industries.

King's Resort & Spa, the first certified hot-spring resort in Taiwan, has transformed into a learning-based organization thanks to KM promotion. Herman Hsu, chairman of the resort, indicated that the resort aims to have access to the information from the employees, transform it to knowledge and launch innovation thereby via KM.

Before launching KM, King's Resort & Spa lacked standard written and electronic document files such as operation content, process and system, as well as the educational training for passing on the professional knowledge, consultant Champ Liu said.

During the KM introduction process, employees were firstly assisted to improve their knowledge of KM, to be followed by the gradual establishment of knowledge acquirement model and system. Later, the KM system tools were introduced to generate cross-department job flows and experience sharing to finish knowledge map establishment and accumulate knowledge document. Hsu indicated that via the KM platform, the cook’s personal recipes and cooking methods can serve as the foundation for future new dishes. If existing cooks leave the post in the future and new cooks have problems during the learning process, the KM platform can offer needed information of the specific dish that the cooks want to learn and this will save much educational costs, Hsu said. The training time for newcomers for the resort has reduced significantly from an average two-month period to two weeks.

With KM, a more flexible staff allocation can be reached: the resort now knows which timeframe what department is in need of more manpower support, so that it can allocate the manpower in advance.

The manpower costs only account for 20% of total revenues of King’s Resort & Spa, which is over 5% less than that from competitors, Hsu said. When the customer finishes booking the accommodation, the resort also finishes customer information and preference record. In addition, the KM platform allows cross-department communication, which helps in saving the response time for remote-enquiry from the customer by 20%.

With more than one year of promoting KM and e-business, King’s Resort & Spa significantly improved its operational efficiency thanks to the KM platform. Not only does it help solving the manpower issue, but effectively lower costs and improving operational performance.