Knowledge Management in Plastic Molding and Manufacturing Industry - Essay Example

Knowledge Management in Plastic Molding and Manufacturing Industry Introduction For years, there has been a concernon the creation, acquisition and communication of knowledge in organizations. The asset in knowledge is much more valuable than in any tangible asset. As such, the need for knowledge management in organizations is well appreciated. According to King (2009), knowledge management involves the assumption that humans could make maximum use of their brains so that organizations fully benefit from such knowledge. Dalkir (2005) defines it as a system, generally IT based, which manages knowledge in organizations so as to support the information creation, capture, storage and even dissemination. The idea behind this is to help employees readily access organizational sources of information and then solutions. For example, an engineer could know what design of a machine would mold plastics in an efficient manner. Sharing such information with the whole plastic manufacturing organization could trigger improved process or new ideas. Borrowing from the plastic molding and manufacturing industry, this paper evaluates the principle of knowledge management so as to recommend appropriate solutions. Characteristics In knowledge management, information technology is used as a tool. These are also referred to as knowledge management tools. This aims at ensuing high quality information, accessibility and user satisfaction. According to Wong (2005), information technology propagates rapid search, access and further retrieval of information. It also supports collaboration and communication among organizational members. These technologies could be grouped as content and document management, customer relationship management, business intelligence and portal among others. It could also include e-learning such as in plastic manufacturing where engineers and other technical staff improve their knowledge continuously through an online learning portal. The knowledge management system should be open and distributed. From the definition, knowledge management system brings together various knowledge management sites which would be integrated through application programming interfaces, APIs (Raman, 2007). Additionally, they should be distributed over various physical locations and host computers. In a plastic manufacturing firm, these could include procurement systems and all other systems up to the distribution system. Integrating these systems provides an opportunity for each of these systems to borrow from each other. For instance, accounting could borrow from sales and marketing to determine the cost of plastic good sold. This also indicates the customizable nature of knowledge management systems to fit within specific organizational needs. Finally, security is a distinctive characteristic of knowledge management. Whereas traditional applications involved the need for access rights from the administrator, knowledge management would require maximization of access to knowledge. As such, it would require that the administrator prohibits users to access only what is meant for them. Therefore, while allowing access to knowledge across the entire organization, knowledge management should foster security (Dalkir, 2005). To ensure this is upheld, a plastic molding firm could hire IT personnel who would manage the entire information system of the organization to ensure that no security breach occurs. Such an administrator would be responsible for granting access to appropriate persons. The need to improve the knowledge assets of an organization so as to improve organizational behaviors, decisions and performance informs the need for KM. As such, King (2009) associates knowledge management to organizational learning noting that while organization learning focuses on processes, KM focuses on knowledge content that an organization acquires, processes and then uses. It could also be considered that organizational learning is the objective of knowledge management. Through encouraging the creation, dissemination and then application of knowledge, it would be appreciated that KM helps the embedding of knowledge on organizational processes to continuously improve on organizational practices and behaviors and the achievement of goals. Thus, organizational learning is a critical way in which organizations sustainably improve knowledge utilization. Impact KM has been noted to impact greatly on modern organizations. The knowledge shared would have an effect on the people, processes, products and organizational performance as noted by Raman (2007). As such, it would be appreciated that KM has an overall impact on all aspects of an organization. The impact of KM on people includes its facilitation of employee learning. Furthermore, it enhances employee adaptability through interactions with other employees. This would make them more acceptable to changes and avoid change resistance (King, 2009). Still on people’s impact of KM, studies have shown that organizations where employees share information with one another experience lower turnovers (Dalkir, 2005). This positively impacts on the revenue and profits of such organizations. This could be attributed to the fact that employees would feel more satisfied from their acquired knowledge and enhanced skills. The market value of such employees would be enhanced relative to employees of other organizations. KM also provides solutions to employee problems thus help in keeping them motivated. Secondly, KM has been noted to impact on processes. Such processes include manufacturing, marketing, public relations and engineering among others. First, KM impacts on the effectiveness of processes, where effectiveness refers to the performance of most suitable processes and also making best decisions possible (Dalkir, 2005). Organizations leverage on KM to be more effective and select most appropriate processes, ensuring minimal mistakes. This enables adaptation of processes to current circumstances thus maintaining the effectiveness of processes with change in time. Furthermore, KM enables organizations to improve on productivity and cost savings. This relates to efficiency which refers to performing processes in a quick and low-cost fashion (Raman, 2007). Finally on processes, KM has been noted to impact on innovation, referring to the creative and novel approach to issues that improve on organizational efficiency and effectiveness. Organizations depend on the knowledge that is shared across the organization to come up with innovative solutions and more innovative processes. KM promotes frequent brainstorming as such improving on process innovation. Another impact of KM is on products. The processes involved in KM allow organizations to come up with new products that would offer greater value than previous products. These are referred to as valued added products by Raman (2007). Moreover, KM also impacts positively on knowledge-based products. Thus, it would be noticed that organizations that embrace knowledge management would have its consultants quickly retrieve and combine best knowledge to provide required solutions. Their customers easily access software solutions based on sharable knowledge. This would be beneficial to plastic manufacturers who have a wide variety of plastic products and who receive varied requests for specialized products. KM would encourage innovation in seeking to meet all customer needs and also provide customers with an opportunity to log in their needs using the appropriate application. The increased efficiency would then impact positively on its products in the market. Finally, KM has been noted to impact on organizational performance. In fact, in this context, KM would be considered as a capital investment that would result in long term benefits to the organization. The accessed knowledge would be used to produce innovative products thus increase revenue and profit to the involved organization. The same effect could be observed when considering return on investments, ROI. Other than this direct impact, KM could also be used to demonstrate intellectual leadership thus important in enhancing customer loyalty. It could also be used to gain advantage in negotiations with respect to partner organizations or competitors (Raman, 2007). Though measuring these indirect impacts could be difficult as compared to direct impacts, they both work together to foster improved organizational performance. This means that people working in plastic molding and manufacturing firms would be presented with greater learning opportunity courtesy of knowledge management. The shared information could relate to effective processes, not just in production but also in accounting, including cost cutting. As such, processes in these firms would become more efficient. The associated employee motivation would particularly cause an increase in production causing an overall positive impact on the performance of the given firms. This would result in an increase in revenues and profits of the involved firms. Recommendation Whereas it has become apparent that knowledge forms a critical component of the driving force of business success, assessing organizational needs forms the basis for determining the best approach to adopting KM system in an organization. This would also help in aligning the KM system to organizational culture and support from management as argued by King (2009). Taking the case of a plastic manufacturer, appreciating that different firms have different processes would be critical in outlining customized KM systems. A KM system that fits well within the organization produces the desired results. Training and education would be an important consideration if KM is to be successful. Basically, this means that members of an organization need to be made aware on the need to manage knowledge, with Wong (2005) noting additional requirement to appreciate this as a critical factor for viability of organizations. The plastic molding and manufacturing industry would particularly be a greater beneficiary of such education because of its numerous processes which could involve numerous tools. These could include tools for procurement, grading, processing, packaging, distribution and accounting. Implementation To implement these recommendations, support from the management would be crucial. This is because leaders act as role models in illustrating the desired KM behavior (Wong, 2005). They should as such exhibit their willingness to share knowledge freely in the organization. This would cause the other employees to imitate them, thus the whole organization. Additionally, the organizational culture should support KM. According to Raman (2007), this culture should be one that values knowledge, encouraging creation, sharing and applying knowledge. On training, it would be important to provide employees with knowledge on the specific tools used for KM systems. The employees have to be trained on how to make full use of the capabilities presented by the various tools to be used for KM. Challenges One of the major challenges in implementing KM systems is the availability of resources. As noted by Wong (2005), financial support would be required if a technological system is to be made to work effectively. Human resources would also be required for coordination and management of implementation process and taking up knowledge-based roles. Furthermore, time would be required for people to share and learn the acquired knowledge. These immense resource requirements could hamper effective implementation of KM systems. The situation is even more pronounced in plastic manufacturing where vast systems, some aimed at connecting to people beyond national boundaries, are used. As such, it would be critical to make KM investment decisions on the basis of the ability to meet resource requirement as opposed to the strategy being good for the business. Borrowing from Dalkir (2005), it would be critical to ensure proper budgeting of resources. Thus, organizations would have to be aware of how to better acquire, allocate and manage resources. Another challenge would be on how to measure the effect of KM. Wong (2005) argues that measurement serves as a collection system that informs on a situation or activity. The researcher further notes that if not measured, KM could just become another management fad. Thus, measuring KM would be critical in order to evaluate its benefits and effectiveness. With this need for measurement arises another challenge: quantifying the benefits of KM is difficult. Even considering financial performance of organizations to sieve the measure for KM could be difficult. As such, Raman (2007) advocates for supplementing financial with non-financial measures. This indicates the use of intellectual capital metrics and the balanced scorecard. This would enable a plastic manufacturer to measure not just the revenues earned and costs incurred but further consider other factors such as customer satisfaction and learning and development among employees. Conclusion Therefore, despite the challenges regarding resources requirement and measurement, knowledge management provides the plastic molding and manufacturing industry a lot of benefits that would help in improving its processes, people, products and performance. Of importance would be to appreciate that the value in knowledge is in sharing such knowledge. As such, organizations should foster knowledge management by allocating this component of organizational processes appropriate resources and ensuring management support in achieving the intended goals. Additionally, organizations should strive to train and educate its teams appropriately to ensure that they acquire the needed skills to effectively engage with KM systems. This way, organizations would convert the value in the knowledge of employees in an organization to ensure achievement of set goals. References Dalkir, K. (2005). Knowledge management in theory and practice. Burlington, MA: Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann. King, W. R. (2009). Knowledge management and organizational learning. Annals of Information Systems, 4, 3 – 13. doi: 10.1007/978-1-4419-0011-1_ Raman, A. T. (2007). Knowledge management. New Delhi: Excel Books. Wong, K. Y. (2005). Critical success factors for implementing knowledge management in small and medium enterprises. Industrial Management and Data Systems, 105 (3), 261 – 279. doi: 10.1108/02635570510590101 Read More