Silly Putty, a one-ounce orb of bouncing, malleable material of indeterminate composition, was a fad in the 1950s and 1960s. The ball of putty inside the bright red plastic egg was magical. For just a week or two's allowance, we could buy the leading-edge technology in toys.

Corporate knowledge, a company's most valuable and volatile resource, is sometimes like Silly Putty: It can be distorted as it is absorbed and can disappear forever before it can be transferred. We wanted to ensure that didn't happen when we rolled out our new ERP system. So, 11 months after we started looking for our new system and two months after we chose our partner, we began to examine our corporate knowledge and revise our standard operating procedures (SOPs) to capture the best of what our people know and blend it into the way we operate with the new software.