Effect of Knowledge Sharing and Supply Chain Management on Organizational Performance

Introduction

Knowledge and supply chain management (SCM) contribution to organizational performance has been increasing with the competitive positioning of mutually complementary competencies and capabilities of technology (Christopher, 2011: 217). The opposite is also true that supply chain problems related to organizational performance can cause approximately 15% loss to companies (Hendricks & Singhal, 2005) and this is still an open issue to be searched (Dong et al., 2009). But some of these SCM problems can be corrected by information and knowledge flow between members (Huhns et al., 2002: 1) even though there has always been concerns with the privacy of information there is more to be gained by sharing information than to lose (Lancioni et al., 2000: 44). Research in order to understand effects of combined correlation of knowledge sharing and SCM issues haven’t been truly understood yet.

The true efficacy for an integrated supply chain can be gained only by the linked processes (Kim, 2006) that supply chain, still incorporating logistics and distribution, is today a very different field of knowledge and routines, with the new technology (Toivo, 2008). Also SCM strongly depends on upstream and downstream flow (Dimitriadis & Koh, 2005) and for effective, real-time decision-making, mission-critical information must be shared timely among customers and suppliers (Nagai et al., 2004: 723). The most important fact, knowledge, in the SCM must be integrated in the networks of data, application, business process and user interaction levels (Christopher, 2011; Ramachandra, 2010: 135) to perform efficacy.

An effective systematically approach to performance measurement could not be established because there is no single entity on performance (Robertson et al., 2002: 135-136). Effective performance measurement system depends on generally financial and other tools like quality, time, flexibility, and cost (Beamon, 1999: 276) that can be mistaken either performance effects can be coming from other processes of the company or defects can occur randomly. Additionally determining throughput based measurement systems can be complicated and don’t be instantaneous (Beamon, 1999: 275; Schragenheim et al., 2009: 201-202). Measurement of SCM’s elements performance instead of evaluating overall SCM performance has more potential to see the performance efficacy. Also the integration of knowledge should be measured to understand whether impacts of SCM and knowledge on organizational performance is reciprocal that performance measurement is taken a system for integrating the management of supply chain and knowledge. Therefore the objectives of the study were appeared to be:

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  Firms` performance correlation level with SCM,

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  Whether knowledge sharing affecting firms` performance,

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  Knowledge sharing correlated with SCM,

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  How SCMs` processes separately affects firms` performance,

The supply chain encompasses organizations to forecast and plan flows of goods and information (Halldorsson et al, 2007; Toivo, 2008: 30) that as information sharing among all the stakeholders in the supply chain system (Hershauer et all, 2005: 390) is improving so the customer satisfaction (Wang, 2012) and the organizational performance is improving.