Assessing the Impact of Knowledge Transfer Mechanisms on Supply Chain Performance

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 chapter 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 for a network perspective as it relates to specific business processes. Viewing the organization in this way enabled the author to see how employee’s 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 employee’s preferred transfer mechanisms as part of an overall process improvement, the E2E supply chain performance was seen to improve significantly.