On site engineers and desk-based staff will be able to delve into the experiences of their whole organisation to solve problems, following the launch of advanced self-help technology from Interchange, the service management vendor.
   Interchange’s Diagnostic Assistance is a knowledge management tool that combines self-learning and artificial intelligence technology so that it updates itself as soon as the new knowledge is entered. The idea is to reduce support costs and improve the speed at which service can be delivered.

Dave Burrows
Interchange Group

When integrated with the field management system, the tool can

automatically select the right engineer with the right tools to get the job done first time, and also identifies failure patterns which will pre-empt future problems before they arise.
   Dave Burrows, Interchange’s director of research and development, commented on the self-learning abilities of the system and how it differs from similar products on the market. “Unlike similar systems, it doesn’t rely on staff (or knowledge engineers) imputing complex and inaccurate decision trees.

As this knowledge acquisition step can account for up to 80 per cent of the costs of a knowledge project, the savings in knowledge implementation costs from this technology can be substantial.
   “Using the latest heuristic (self-learning) algorithms, our software uses the engineers’ experiences in the field, remembers them and replicates these solutions when the same situation arises in the future by automatically generating decision trees that match the experience in the field,” says Burrows.