Talented workforce is one of the main strengths in Europe to overcome the economic crisis and address the challenges ahead. The most valuable knowledge the employees have, is tacit and, therefore, hard to utilize in the companies. This paper presents two alternative facilitation methods to capture tacit knowledge related to the manufacturing process, thus allowing the employees participate in activities developing the manufacturing process and the development of positive company culture. The first method focuses on operational tacit knowledge, and the latter method extracts the production related tacit knowledge from the project members. Both of the methods use facilitation to guide the employees through the experience-based learning process and provide support for information and knowledge sharing.

Efficient knowledge and information management is essential for companies to prosper in the rapidly changing global environment. This article presents challenges of a large Finnish multinational company relating to their current knowledge and information management practices and systems. The focus is on New Product Introduction (NPI) process. The study is based on interviews and facilitated workshops in the Research and Development (R&D) and Production departments. Furthermore, the identified challenges are reflected to the findings presented in knowledge and information management literature. The results gained from the company case study were well in line with the findings in the literature. Three main topics, which can be generalized to cause challenges for knowledge and information management in most companies, were recognized: 1) Issues related to human behavior, individual characteristics and capabilities, different backgrounds, and professional vocabulary; 2) Codifying tacit knowledge into explicit information, which can be saved to company information system; 3) Lack of interoperability between different information systems. The study provides the management of the case company, and other similar organizations, focus points while seeking for better knowledge and information management. From a scientific perspective, the main contribution of this article is to give practical examples of how the theoretical findings presented in literature manifest themselves in real industrial practices.