Inter- & Intradepartmental Knowledge Management Barriers when Offering Single Unit Solutions

Abstract

The Business-to-Business market is increasingly characterized by customers asking for solutions fitting their infrastructure and functional requirements in a short timeframe. The high frequency of such single unit solutions together with the unpredictable and often very specific customer requests impose a challenge onto the supplier’s knowledge management. This paper analyses current corresponding knowledge management barriers, which hamper the production process, in particular, because of misunderstandings between sales and engineering departments. The aggregation of the results of a literature review and an empirical study identifies three measures for overcoming these barriers in order to establish a global culture of knowledge sharing.