With a history spanning more than 150 years, KSB is a significant player in the fluid handling sector, manufacturing and selling hydraulic pumps, valves, automation products, and related services.
KSB has been growing continuously since it was founded in 1871. Today, the KSB Group has a presence on all continents with its own sales and marketing companies, manufacturing facilities, and service operations. They have amassed nearly 200 service locations and 35 production sites worldwide. The company boasts over 16,000 employees and generates annual consolidated sales revenue approaching three billion euros.
KSB serves an incredibly diverse market with a wide product range and numerous applications. As Markus explained, this complexity is magnified because many products are highly configurable, meaning no two identical pumps might leave the factory for months.
This often results in tailor-made solutions for specific applications, especially in certain fields. Examples of KSB's involvement range from small heating circulation pumps in homes to critical boiler feed pumps in nuclear plants.
Given the complexity of their products and the diversity of applications, KSB is "highly, highly dependent on fluid handling know-how". This encompasses deep knowledge about both KSB's products and the individual applications they serve. Markus highlighted that being the "fluid handling know-how champion in the market" is one of KSB's official strategic goals and a core contributor to their success.
“With that product range and with those types of applications, that means we are dependent, we are highly, highly dependent on fluid handling know-how, which means we don't only have to know a lot about our products, but we have to have a very, very deep know-how and knowledge, expertise about the individual applications." - Markus Vaas, Manager of Global Know-How at KSB
This strategic focus is also tied to KSB's quantitative goals: increasing sales from roughly 3 billion to 4 billion euros in the next five years while improving EBIT margin. Since the company is already globally present, growth must come from increased efficiency. KSB leadership identified enhanced know-how access as a primary lever for boosting this efficiency, crucial for every sales process.
Before Starmind, accessing KSB's internal knowledge was often a "tedious process". According to Markus, colleagues would typically ask someone nearby, call a known expert, email a centralised department, or search for potentially outdated documents circulated via email. This manual approach meant that issues and questions were often asked repeatedly, leading to repetitive effort.
Starmind was introduced to provide "very, very efficient know-how access to all the knowledge, all the expertise we have". The primary use case centres around the direct sales chain, where questions typically arise from field sales or service colleagues interacting with customers. These questions often travel through various internal roles, such as inside sales contacts, application specialists, product managers, developers, or lab specialists, before the knowledge flows back. Starmind aims to provide huge leverage by making this process more efficient.
Beyond core fluid handling questions, Starmind also serves a secondary focus group addressing queries related to certificates, legal terms, lead times, and delivery terms, all indirectly, but closely linked to the sales process, where time savings can be significant.
Surprisingly, a third focus group emerged, with employees using the platform for general HR questions, demonstrating its utility as a single interface for finding answers, regardless of the topic. As Markus noted, "if that saves five or 10 minutes for that colleague getting that answered in the same interface, in the same system, it's time saved and it's efficiency gained".
A natural concern with leveraging "swarm intelligence" is the risk of inaccurate or "worst practices" being shared. Markus acknowledged this possibility, noting that incorrect information has always circulated informally. However, Starmind provides tools that were previously unavailable, ensuring, among other things, security and compliance.
Starmind allows for the "many eyes principle", where multiple people can comment on and improve answers over time. Answers can have a "validity date" or "shelf life," prompting users to re-verify with experts. A certification stamp can also indicate that an answer has been validated by a specific department.
These features empower colleagues to assess the trustworthiness of information and contribute to improving the collective knowledge base over time. Starmind brings previously informal and hard-to-control knowledge sharing "into the light," offering a chance to notice and correct inaccuracies.
Adoption has been smoother than expected. KSB focused on keeping entry barriers low, avoiding complicated rules or processes for phrasing questions or answers. Surprisingly, there was minimal skepticism from experienced experts concerned about becoming obsolete.
Markus suggested this might be industry-specific, as KSB has many engineers proud and willing to share their knowledge. The main skepticism encountered was regarding the accuracy of information on the platform, which required significant communication and expectation management.
KSB implemented Starmind using a phased approach, starting with 250 handpicked users representing a balanced mix of know-how demand and availability. They are now expanding to around 1,500 users, still carefully selecting regions, departments, and teams to ensure representation across KSB's diverse applications and topics. This curation is vital to ensure that questions asked on the platform can actually be answered.
A welcome surprise during the rollout was the enthusiasm of subject matter experts. Instead of reluctance, experts were keen to join, seeing the value in answering repetitive questions once in Starmind, rather than multiple times weekly.
Measuring the impact of Starmind, like many knowledge management tools, is notoriously challenging. KSB aims to quantify the time saved looking for answers, contacts, and experts. They also expect experts to save time answering repetitive questions. Expected benefits include an overall rise in quality and reduced errors due to more consistent answers globally.
Furthermore, Starmind helps identify "hidden champions" – knowledgeable individuals whose expertise wouldn't be apparent from their job title or place on an organizational chart. KSB is developing KPIs to measure the multiplication effect of answers and the number of times non-obvious experts provide highly rated answers.
While precise financial quantification is difficult, KSB complements quantitative efforts with a qualitative approach, collecting user testimonials and conducting interviews to understand the impact on daily work, employee satisfaction, and reduced frustration.
Getting Starmind approved by IT, data security, compliance, and legal departments required navigating significant hurdles. KSB's approach involved engaging with IT early, participating in meetings, and leveraging the standardised documentation and pre-answered questions provided by Starmind.
A phased technical approach, starting with Starmind as a standalone SaaS web app before integrating into existing systems, also helped manage the process. Future plans include integrating Starmind into tools like Microsoft Teams, where users already spend their time.
Looking ahead, the discussion touched upon the rise of Generative AI and large language models (LLMs). Markus doesn't see these as making Starmind obsolete but rather as potential synergistic partners. While LLMs can interact with documented information, they lack the tacit knowledge held by experts.
Starmind excels at surfacing this undocumented knowledge. The ideal future involves combining these capabilities: using GenAI to chat with documented information and Starmind to find experts to validate outputs, especially for critical decisions. This ensures that even as documented knowledge grows, the vital, ever-evolving tacit knowledge in experts' heads remains accessible and verifiable.
"Large language models can be very powerful, but they rely on things to be documented. They rely on data to be written down. And anything that isn't written down, they can't [use]. Whereas Starmind allows you to do exactly that, surface tacit knowledge and retain it for the future." - Clemens Hagg - Territory Account Director in Sales at Starmind
KSB's proactive approach to knowledge management demonstrates how an established industrial company is embracing digital tools like Starmind to become more efficient, empower its employees, and maintain its position as a know-how champion in a complex global market.
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