“Designing a manufacturing network entails devising and managing flows of innovation and know-how – not just determining what to produce and where – and organizing the resulting logistic flows.”
- Arnoud De Meyer and Ann Vereecke
Spread of knowledge across all level of operation within a company, that’s what meant by knowledge sharing within a company. Perhaps this really sound intuitively obvious or suggest nothing new, this is no easy matter. Consider big company such as Apple, knowledge sharing is an important foundational aspect of the company, in term maintain of its cost-effective management and distinctive tech advantage. Most tech company with strong project culture often face the problem of knowledge sharing where there is less interaction when the competition between project teams seems to be tense. (Does this already give you a hint on any project culture based company, that often came out with its products with overlapping functionality and targeted customer, but taking too long time? It is good to know why is this happening ) It is always interesting to study about company operation system, (perhaps at time you could even go through their financial report that are easier available online. Get ready to be shock to learn how much you are subsiding company advertisement but not its materials for products.) It just corporate culture, healthy or not, it is just too common.
So who are in charge of making sure that knowledge sharing in company is functioning WELL… COO of company. This then emphasize how significant this it for corporation, considering COO as one of the highest-ranking executives in company. I remember very well from one of lecture session I attended last few weeks where my professor asked the students, us, to guess the average salary of the executives. He told us to weight the important of each of the top management executive first. Surprisingly the result of the statistic is very different from the rough guess.
No doubt, we couldn’t agree more that CEO will top the list in the salary distribution stats, they are the group of people who are the most important with the highest contributions and greatest influences. It is simply just how we perceived and exist to be true so… perfect. We then talked about few positions that would enjoy a rather lower basic salary, and then it is finally a debatable discussion between the CFO and COO. Being the person to be in charge of the whole company financial planning and control. It is reasonable assure that CFO will be a major player in the industry with highest payment receive for its over exhaustive workload. I simply made a guess that CFO would be the 2nd in the list . But…
Sources from: www.salary.com
Ow.. COO.
K. that’s me to be. LOL jk, I am going after finance, at this stage. Of course the stats is not really accurate in estimating the salary distribution all over the world, these are just rough estimation that give simple description in the states. It shows that COO are simply more important person (among a group of very important people) because they would be essentially taking up the heavy responsibility of ensuring knowledge sharing flows. See I am coming round to my title there. =)
Strength of innovation grows from the access of knowledge sharing in company. Removal of boundaries to share information is necessary to encourage culture shift regardless of strategy. I studied this article on“How to optimize knowledge sharing in factory network" from McKinney Quarterly for days and finally have a good grasp of it. I have to say it is really challenging for me, with my limited exposure in this area and knowledge. Yes it is part of my course requirement, but I did more that the course requirement on that and so i decided to share. Not precisely everything that i share on the discussion board on the course website, but part of the main point. Perhaps I could have receive more view and comments to further improve myself, as there is not much material easily available on this topic of study. Discussion in the area (on the discussion board of my course website) mainly talks about knowledge sharing among companies, I ...doubt whether are they discussing the right content about the article, or something out of it, or... maybe it is just me who misunderstood everything? I shall know after my prof evaluate on that, IF he does comment on this thing, b'cause maybe he will skip that part, to be nice.
Technically, nature of factory could range from being isolated, receiver, hosting to active network, with varies cost and efficiency in term of productivity and innovation. In modern day with the advancement in tech and transportation, active network factories are functioning well where networking is no longer a tiring and hard task. The article is insightful and I spent time a lot of time understanding the technical term. The way the author has categorize the factory accordingly is unprecedented from my limited understanding. Despite the explanation and example given, I was having trouble trying to difference between the nature of isolated factory and receiver. What do the author actually mean by receiver plant. I couldn't actually define it, but my view is receiver plants are mostly those manufacturing or automation factory with needs for high-tech to increase its efficiency and productivity. The factory act as supporting plant that takes in new idea, and make it happen by improving in its technology to support its production from time to time. The communication style of the plant in the company network is passive, where not much internal knowledge is share out with other factories. The chance of survival is low in comparison to hosting or active network because the distinctive advantage of low labor cost is not a major advantage.
It is good to know how factory management can possibly improve their chances of survival by transforming their nature of behavior. This is essentially important for Multinational Corporation with lots of factories around the world. When factory management realized matter of survival does not ties with the geography advantages, they will be able to put the right focus on exploring new market potential within the area located, and also maintaining healthy network relations for optimizing knowledge sharing. I shall take multinational corporation Toyota for example. During the starting of this Japan Company, the company strategy was to focus on the Asian market, where the design is more suitable and can simply fit in the culture. When they start attack US market, they first attempt to improve their design into extended version with larger space to fit in western culture. Active network among factories are then built with the shared info of customer preference and professional knowledge. They provide data that stimulate innovative ideas to every factory under the chain. Today, Toyota claimed its big part of share in the automobile market, nothing is achievable without its strong hosting and active factories network. If the company factories are mostly receiver, the consequences are devastating when headquarter is unable to provide “innovation injection” at hard time due to crisis the country might face right now. Optimizing knowledge sharing include effective step such as decentralization. Knowledge flows among the factory, where the relevant management has full-access to information with stable cooperation with factories from different places.
Till next time.
