Today, much of the value of a company is based on intangible assets, and in particular, the knowledge of its people. Knowledge Management is the process of harnessing this important asset. Many current efforts revolve around the creation of 'yellow pages' or directories documenting the skills of associates, and knowledge bases, which tend to be document repositories with hyperlinks.
It's challenging enough to figure out how to capture knowledge in any form, but to capture it in an actionable form is the ultimate challenge. Current efforts still rely heavily on a person searching the knowledge base, and then figuring out how to apply what they've learned to the task at hand. Also, extending and maintaining a knowledge base can be difficult and tedious.
Apprentice Systems captures your organization's knowledge in a form that is immediately actionable. Our tools - Apprentice Product Modeler, Apprentice Process Modeler, Apprentice Decision Modeler - can capture an expert's rules for products, processes and decisions easily and quickly through a visual interface. The rules are immediately available for use by Apprentice applications. New rules are integrated with the click of a mouse, without a line of code being written. Rules from many people, including conflicting information, can be considered simultaneously - there doesn't need to be one right way to do things. Rules can even be inferred by considering actual solutions that have been generated in the past and over time. That is why we call ourselves Apprentice Systems (not Expert Systems); our products learn from you, the real expert.
