Improving Supply Chain Performance through the Implementation of Process Related Knowledge Transfer Mechanisms

Abstract

With the complexity of organizations increasing, it is becoming vitally important that organizations understand how knowledge is created and shared around their core business processes. However, many organizations deploy technology without due consideration for how their employees access, create, and share information and knowledge. This article explores the subject empirically through the study of how employees work with information and knowledge around a core business function—in this case a supply chain process. In order to do this, the organization needs to be viewed from a network perspective as it relates to specific business processes. Viewing the organization in this way enabled the author to see how employees’ preferred knowledge and information transfer mechanisms varied across the core process. In some cases, the identified transfer mechanisms where at odds with the prescribed organization wide mechanisms. However, when the organization considered the employees’ preferred transfer mechanisms as part of an overall process improvement, the E2E supply chain performance was seen to improve significantly.