Knowledge Management

Knowledge managemen<sup>t</sup> was one of the decision categories which had the largest number of improvements during the empirical study and the highest number of "partially applied with intended improvement". One of the most significant improvements implemented was to share customisation information among departments, by using a customised units database. Initially, data regarding the customisation of housing units were held on by the CT and operations only. After that change, the CT compiles that information and shares it in the company intranet, making it available to sales and other departments. Additionally, any changes in customers' orders are also registered in that database. These improvements resulted in a high level of implementation of practices related to the "communication of customisation information" decision domain (see Table 4 practices one to seven), ye<sup>t</sup> with room for improvement.

Even though the CT considered that many of the partially adopted practices of the "customer based knowledge" decision domain (see Table 4 practices eight to 13) had to be improved, there was much concern with how to operationalise the proposed practices, due to limited resources, and fear of exhausting customers with too many questions.

When discussing practice eight, "POE to understand customers' needs, capture new requirements and feedback the NDP", the CT stated that it would be beneficial to know customers' desires and preferences by including questions related to the scope of customisation on the existing POE. This improvement would avoid the initial concern to overload CT with an additional task and overwhelm customers with too many questionnaires.

Practices 14, 15 and 16 are related to the "organisational knowledge" decision domain, and for the last two of them, the company has plenty of data. However, the data have not been processed to create knowledge. For instance, practice 16, "share information regarding customisation performance ... ", is at its early adoption stage. Another example is practice 15, related to the creation of metrics: the CT argued that they have a large amount of data, but have not been able to establish any metrics yet. The reflections regarding strengths and shortcomings of the company strategy also inspired the proposition of a new practice, named "use methods and discussions to learn from practices adopted in other departments and levels of customisation", fostering the creation of a knowledge creation system and continuous improvement.

## Level of Customisation

Practices 17 to 19 (see Table 4) are related to the definition of the level of customisation. The CT reported that they o ffer options for the attributes defined by the company, according to market segments and CODPs, ye<sup>t</sup> the variation of the solution space o ffered in di fferent projects is small. Nevertheless, the CT argued that they intend to o ffer more variety (e.g., painting services), as this would probably contribute to increasing customer satisfaction. However, the decision about the solution space should be carefully defined, as this would also a ffect operations. Furthermore, the decisions regarding the level of customisation are more strategic, once it might a ffect di fferent departments, being out of the scope of the CT to be undertaken.
