Imagine you work for a small manufacturing company that make

Imagine you work for a small manufacturing company that makes designer faucets for kitchen and bathroom remodeling. They have a small design team, a sales group, and a manufacturing facility. Most sales are conducted directly with remodeling contractors. Senior management has started reading about knowledge management and has asked you to explore opportunities for improving knowledge.

What do you think are the most important knowledge assets for this company? How could each of the following employee groups benefit from knowledge management? Designers and engineers, Sales department staff, Executive Management.

Solution

Knowledge Management is a process of capturing, developing, sharing and effectively using organiztions knowledge. It is an approch which helps in achieving objectives of organization by making best use of knowledge.

The most important knowledge asset of this company is explicit knowledge about the product and its design and shared tactic knowledge.

Knowledge management can be used in each and every field in order to achieve the organizational goals. The role of knowledge management in following groups are as follows:

1) Designers and Engineers : The knowledge management can enable the designers and engineers to design a system that is easy to use, where the problems are discussed and conclusions are reached. It can be done with the help of intranet facality in the organization. As a result more time would be spent on result oriented work and queries would be solved as early as possible. Moreover evryone would know their responsibilities and duties.

2) Sales Department Staff : The knowledge management will help by providing a facality in which the communication with the customers can be done easily and the expectations and demands of customers can be exchanged within the organization easily. Office systems can be used for collecting and sharing information.

3) Executive Management : The knowledge management will enable the executive management to do the analysis and see the trends by having all the detailed as well as summarised information from different departments which enable them to make further decisions which make a path towards achieving the organizational objective.