Over the past twenty years, the industrial society of the last century has been transforming itself more and more into an innovation- and service-driven knowledge society. For industries such as the life sciences or for telecommunications and industrial enterprises, the efficient utilisation of knowledge has become a decisive factor in competitive success. Immediately available, highly-qualified knowledge accelerates business-critical processes and thus generates quantifiable added value. This trend is set to grow stronger in the years to come.

At the same time, knowledge is becoming obsolete faster, and relevant expertise is distributed in an ever greater number of heads. Often, success-critical know-how is not documented and therefore difficult to ascertain. It gets lost for the value-added process. Anyone who can't access specific knowledge about their problem at the right time will miss the boat or cause mistakes and additional costs.

For this reason, many companies are increasingly challenged to put the production factor 'knowledge' to optimal use in their business processes. The "knowledge management" solutions currently on the market are almost entirely restricted to the storage and archiving of electronic documents and data and methods of retrieving information thus stored. The systematic and situational inclusion of specialists and their expertise is neglected.

Such considerations along with the relevant professional backgrounds of those involved led to the founding of finebrain AG in Basel in 2000. Together with highly-specialised industry and technology partners, finebrain offers a software solution and consulting services that optimise knowledge-intensive processes.

finebrain pursues a holistic concept. The range of services includes the capture and critical analysis of business processes, the generation of improvement measures in terms of the way knowledge is organised and deploying these for business process support and continual optimisation with the help of client-specific implementation of finebrain-developed software. As part of its product portfolio, finebrain is additionally involved with the development and sale of its proprietary software product ("finebrain™ Expertise Platform"). finebrain software is a system for networking various knowledge carriers (people and documents) and for structuring this network on the basis of process-relevant fields of knowledge.

finebrain offers industry-specific services focused on business process optimisation in certain select areas, namely on processes in technology support, product marketing support and research & development. Our customers include globally active corporations with a concentration on IT and telecommunications, the life sciences and technical industry.

finebrain's strong position as a centre of excellence for expertise management is being further enhanced by practical experience on client projects, the logical extension and continued development of its software and a deepening of its industry-specific know-how – including the exchange of knowledge and experience within the scope of EU research programmes with prestigious industry partners (incl. Xerox, Fraunhofer Society).

Within the broad field of application known as "knowledge support", finebrain is active in the expertise management segment. The market for expertise management is gaining in significance due to the fast increasing complexity of business processes, constant pressure to innovate and continuing process of globalisation – meaning decentralisation is also increasing in importance. For this market finebrain offers a combination of holistic solutions, industry-specific competence and specially-developed proprietary software.

Expertise management involves making the explicit (i.e. documented) and implicit knowledge ("what's inside people's heads") within organisations utilisable. A key factor in this is the deployment of innovative software platforms that automate the networking of people or the codification of expert knowledge.

But for finebrain, the software is always only a part of the overall solution. Equally important for the success of a project is profound sector-specific knowledge in process consulting, intelligent knowledge structures and a proven implementation methodology. That's why we always deploy our software in close connection with consulting and implementation services carried out in cooperation with our highly-specialised industry partners.