The MTA core activity is Knowledge Management.

What is Knowledge
Knowledge is defined as expertise and skills acquired by a person through experience or education, the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject, the awareness or familiarity gained by experience of a fact or a situation. In an organizational context, knowledge is the collective body of experience and understanding and resides in the intelligence and the competence of people, with the ability to use it for managing both planned and unplanned situations.

Where is Knowledge
Generally speaking, knowledge resides in a cognitive system, that can be a human, a group, an organization, a computer, or some combination. It is a construct that is not directly observable. It is specific to and not residing outside the cognitive system that created it.

Why should we apply Knowledge
To serve customers well and develop business, companies must: reduce their cycle times, operate with minimum fixed assets and overhead (people, inventory and facilities), shorten product development time, improve customer service, empower employees, innovate and deliver high quality products, enhance flexibility and adaption. None of this is possible without a continual focus on the creation, updating, availability, quality and use of knowledge by all employees and teams. Knowledge is one critical factor that makes personal, organizational and societal intelligent behavior possible, providing the only sustainable competitive advantage. Knowledge is more relevant to sustained business than capital, labor or land. Nevertheless, in many cases it remains the most neglected asset.

Knowledge risks
In the last several years a lot of businesses have been overwhelmed by the information explosion, due to the growing speed of any business process driven by a constantly increasing competition level. At the same time, companies are suffering from a faster transition in personnel which more and more affects lot of organizations. The learning process that people undergo once they enter a company often leaves with them: oftentimes a person leaves and takes the entire storehouse of knowledge about its job.

What is Knowledge Management
Knowledge management is the attempt to secure the experience of the individuals who comprise a corporation. Historically, knowledge has always been managed, at least implicitly. However, effective and active knowledge management requires new perspectives and techniques and touches on almost all facets of an organization. This is the current business challenge!

Knowledge management is an audit of "intellectual assets" that highlights unique sources, critical functions and potential bottlenecks which hinder knowledge flows to the point of use. It protects intellectual assets from decay and seeks opportunities to enhance them, in order to improve learning capacity, problem solving, decision making, added value of services and products to customers by adding intelligence in all business processes.

How is Knowledge Management structured
Organizations have now to look at "knowledge" as a resource as well. This means that they need ways for managing the knowledge in their organization. The main Knowledge Management processes to be governed are:

• Knowledge generation
• Knowledge organization
• Knowledge dissemination
• Knowledge utilization

MTA is acting at various levels in all these steps.

Knowledge generation
Doing is Knowing.
The MTA management is constantly monitoring all problems and solutions that the whole company faces and adopts, in order to include any new understanding in the body of the existing company Knowledge. Besides, by using the skills and the tools of the Aldo Occari Innovation Center, any new Knowledge is deeply analyzed for a complete understanding, preventing also individual interpretations by different people in the Group.

Knowledge organization
MTA is a horizontal organization of experts inside the main technical functions of the whole Manuli Group. These people are asked to constantly classify, standardize and codify the company expertise in appropriate media, such as procedures, best practices, manuals, tutorials and presentations.

Knowledge dissemination
Some of the company experts, after appropriate training, are accredited teachers as well. The codified Knowledge becomes thus available for internal and external training. On line and on site courses are provided by MTA teachers.

Knowledge utilization
This is more an activity of the MTA users. Nevertheless, through the experts working in Technical Marketing and Quality Claim Management, employees and customers can be supported upon request when facing problem of special complexity or novelty.