KM and clones revisited

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I blogged a while ago about the powerful combination of standardisation and knowledge management as a way of driving down project costs and times, with some illustrations from clone projects within the oil sector.

Here's an example from another sector - the Nuclear sector. According to this great presentation, Korea pursued a clear strategy for their Nuclear Reactors, building each one to a standard design, and ensuring a rigourous approach to "Lesson learned from one project implementation to another by both factory and field labor". The attached graph shows the result - a progressive reduction in time and cost to build their plants.

Now perhaps this is natural learning. Perhaps KM has nothing to do with it?  But contrast this with the Japanese equivalent, where there was no program of standardisation, and therefore no opportunity for learning from one construction to another. In the Japanese case, we see no learning curve at all. So yet again the combination of standardisation and lesson-learning can be a powerful driver behind industry economics and competitiveness.