Capture valuable know-how and make it accessible at lightning speed

Medium-sized bakeries face various challenges on a daily basis, including the distribution of expertise in the heads of experienced employees, difficulties in effectively passing on this knowledge to inexperienced employees, the loss of valuable experience due to retirement or a change of company, the lack of structured training and induction processes, and the previous absence of assisting knowledge-based systems.

For this reason, the renowned Fraunhofer Institute for Process Engineering and Packaging IVV, the traditional Saxon bakery Möbius, and the leading wiki software producer Hallo Welt! have joined forces in a research project. They aim to develop a knowledge management system based on a wiki that enables users to collect knowledge quickly and systematically. This is done with the help of forms that users can use even without extensive prior knowledge. In the background, an intelligent ontology ensures that the knowledge content is structured and easy to find.

However, the heart of the knowledge management system is the interactive chatbot. This enables employees to retrieve knowledge in the wiki through voice queries. Similar to ChatGPT, the system can answer questions about problems, provide examples, and clarify queries. “The system learns through dialog with the user,” explains Dr. Lukas Oehm, group manager at the Fraunhofer Institute. “User feedback leads to continuous adaptation and improvement of the ontology to answer future queries even better.”

The managing director of Hallo Welt!, Dr. Anja Ebersbach, emphasizes the special significance of this interdisciplinary collaboration: “It is precisely the link between research and software development and business practice that makes this project so valuable. A concrete, implementable solution is being developed here that can be transferred to other industries.” In this way, technologies that were previously only used by large corporations are also being made available to medium-sized companies.

The WiBe-Back research project sees itself as a valuable contribution to overcoming the challenges faced by many small and medium-sized enterprises in the age of digitalization and the shortage of skilled workers.

Hallo Welt! GmbH is the company behind the open-source enterprise wiki software BlueSpice, which is distributed in more than 160 countries with over 1 million downloads. The Regensburg-based company builds collaborative software for knowledge management and online documentation since 2007.