K-BEST for Supply Chain Knowledge - A System for Knowledge Management in Supply Chains

Abstract

A supply chain is as an important strategic framework because it provides a powerful infrastructure to enable the coordination of practices to meet customers' requirements. Best practices knowledge in supply chains needs contextualisation to reveal favourable and unfavourable consequences. In order to provide contextualisation, a more formalised and systematic approach to understand practices is required but no suitable existing scheme was identified to represent Supply Chain Knowledge (SCK). This research is focused on the creation of a knowledge management approach to address the structure, contextualisation and control of SCK. The approach adopted combined theoretical knowledge management concepts and supply chain practitioner valuation using three iterative research cycles. The first was focused on research into the structure of SCK. The second was to research into contextualisation of SCK. The third cycle to research into knowledge control processes and evaluated the feasibility of the proposed scheme. Findings were incorporated into a demonstrator tool, which is a web-based software application. This research confirmed the feasibility of the scheme components and suggested further benefits such as self-learning of SCK and that it is both feasible and important to practitioners that an approach, similar to the one proposed, is adopted.