Knowledge Management
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Knowledge Management Final
Kirubel Alemu
INFO 4307
Abstract
This paper highlights an approach to determine the effectiveness of knowledge management in knowledge-intensive organizations. Different organizations use knowledge management to improve their business performance. It deals with the development, storage, retrieval, and dissemination of information within the organization. Organizations also use other knowledge management tools to improve their performance and efficiency. Organizations need to apply knowledge management to compete with other organizations in the market and become more innovative. Km application helps to bear all the problems within the organizations. This paper aims to explore the implementation of knowledge management in PepsiCo and the knowledge management tools that are used by the organization to ensure that they have the right processes and procedures in place to manage, store and share organizational knowledge.
Introduction
Knowledge management is now considered one of the most critical challenges. Most companies are now training their employees to learn new processes that can assist the organizations in getting maximum market share. It involves the systematic management of the organizational assets to create value and meet the organizational goals. It consists of the startups, processes, strategies that enhance the storage. It establishes and provides the right tools, people, knowledge, structures, team, and culture to increase the learning process. It also gives information about implementing the new knowledge that can be us at the right time by the right people (Duffy, 2000). Knowledge management helps improve organizational efficiency and saves the knowledge within the company. It involves the accumulation, storage, and sharing of knowledge. The goal and target are to create a learning culture in the organization. There are many benefits of knowledge management, such as increased work efficiency, better decision-making, collaboration among the staff members, training the employees, and increases employees' happiness (Wiig, 1997). Therefore, it is an essential tool that can be used by any company that wants to improve its’ bottom line and market share.
Dimensions of Knowledge Management
Six essential dimensions of knowledge management are needed to be followed by each organization for obtaining the maximum market share. Let's discuss each of these dimensions in the section below (Lopes & Pilatti, 2013).
Dimension 1: The strategic factors and senior management play an essential role in knowledge management. The role of the senior management is to encourage the employees to explore new areas of knowledge within the organization and establish visions for more innovative projects. Leadership and management within the organization is crucial to success. Therefore, team collaboration is equally vital along with the development of creative projects (Lopes & Pilatti, 2013).
Dimension 2: Cultural and organizational values make a huge impact, and these values can help understand the difference between appropriate and inappropriate in the work space. These values can also be interpreted as control systems that have the potential of achieving great effectiveness. The culture of the organizations is also crucial for strategic development. Therefore, the culture must promote creativity, collaboration, teamwork, and freedom, and senior management must develop a better organizational culture (Lopes & Pilatti, 2013).
Dimension 3: A bureaucratic organizational structure is becoming inadequate to meet the challenges. Organic and most entrepreneurial companies are now making efforts to change this structure and develop a more dynamic and intensive design. The development is still in progress as companies are more innovative and seek to leverage creativity and knowledge at multiple hierarchical levels (Lopes & Pilatti, 2013).
Dimension 4: The information systems of an organization directly influence the generation and storage of knowledge. Every organization needs to have an effective information system for its employees where they are able to access the information no matter where they are sitting.
Dimension 5: Learning from the external environment is of great benefit as it helps to increase learning. The employees must be aware of all the factors that contribute to the success and the downfall of an organization, such as customer feedback, competitor analysis, new and innovative technology, and various other factors (Lopes & Pilatti, 2013).
Dimension 6: Human resources must be associated with acquisition directly as they influence the management of learning, innovation, and knowledge through hiring, selection, training, career, and reward systems. The organization must hire talented people to attract the consumers, so for this purpose, the selection of the candidates must be based on merit rather than reference. The individuals must be encouraged to work in teams and must listen to the viewpoint of others (Lopes & Pilatti, 2013). The individuals must strive to adopt such schemes that improve the organization's overall performance and market share.
Knowledge Management in PepsiCo Inc.
PepsiCo Inc. came into existence in 1965 and started to expanded globally in the late nineties. The company is an American multinational company and its headquarters is located in Purchase, New York. It is a company with interests in marketing and manufacturing varying from carbonated to non-carbonated beverages, cereals, and other snacks. The main aim of the company is to increase the value of the shareholder's investment. The company believes that its success depends on producing good quality products, customer satisfaction, and consumer satisfaction. The company manufactures products that are safe and healthy, as well as easily affordable.
Organizational Culture and Structure
The company operates in all the six major continents of the world, including Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Australia, and Europe. Their corporations are divided into these continents, and the inter-organizational structure has many subdivisions. They produce beverages and other products at the manufacturing plant, and from there, it gets delivered to the suppliers and distributors. The distributors give the products to the retailers, and from there it is delivered to the customers (Church, et al, 2014). The supply chain in different countries ate controlled by the one main headquarter located in New York.
The company aims to manage the supply of ingredients and maintain the quality of water. It produces purified water to keep the overall quality of the products. It has the best technology and storage capacity and inventory processes to maintain the quality and freshness of the manufactured products (Church, et al, 2014). The company is trying to keep its high performance to retain its market position. It is using its organizational cultures in strategic development to achieve its goals. The culture focuses on protecting the rights of the employees and using their capabilities to improve the performance of the business. The main features of the PepsiCo organizational culture are leadership, performance with purpose, and collaboration among the team members.
The employees of the company are dedicated to achieving excellence in their performance. Their main goal is to satisfy the customers and increase their stakes by manufacturing quality products. These features indicate that the employees in the organization are dedicated to fulfilling their corporate social responsibilities. Moreover, the employees are encouraged to address the stakeholders' concerns, which keeps the employees highly motivated to do better. (Church, et al, 20140). This makes them put efforts to improve the performance of their organization.
The company's leadership is based upon the demands and needs of the community, customers, investors and employees. Employee knowledge is used in the company to set up an administration. In more explicit terms, the company is promoting the employees to leadership positions. This organization's internal structure indicates that the organization facilitates employees' work-based experiential knowledge to fuel their leadership growth. As a result, the process of learning is maintained in the organization. The higher positions are not dedicated to a few employees; instead, they are promoted based on their talent, expertise, and experience. This motivates the employees to do better in the future for the success of an organization.
Teamwork and collaboration are an integral part of the culture of the organization. The company believes that collaboration among the team members of the organization help in achieving excellence in the business. The organization has made teams promote teamwork where different team members listen to others patiently and then make a final decision that goes in favor of the organization. This makes it clear that the organization is not relying on individuals' efforts; instead, it gives everyone a chance to participate in the organization's success.
Organizational Processes
Design of Goods and Services: The company's objective is to design goods and services, and the purpose is to match interests and benefits. The main factors that are needed to be considered are the capacity of the organization and the market demand. The company analyzes the preferences and requests carefully then helps in the development and manufacturing of the products as per the requirements of the market and the consumers. The company also conducts market research and analysis to get an idea about the latest trends, such as the consumer's lifestyle. Such research and study give a future road map to the organization to achieve high-performance excellence.
Quality management: This is also vital to the success of the organization. The objective is to optimize the quality based on consumer demand and market competition. The company's goal is to provide the best and high-quality products to its consumers under Human sustainability goals. Most of the products manufactured by the company contain low calories and less salt. The organization is highly concerned about the health and safety of its consumers. Therefore, it is not compromising on the quality of its products and it is producing one of the best quality products according to consumer demands.
Process and Design of Capacity: The Company aims to maximize its production cost ratio. The company's manufacturing facilities are designed highly with high output assembly lines. Moreover, most of the processes are automated for maximum efficiency.
Location and Layout Design Strategy: The company has many divisions and sub-divisions that are located in different part of many countries. The aim of all these outlets are to reach the maximum market areas. Therefore, the facilities are located near most retailers. The company is also interested in more prominent retail outlets because it wants to maximize sales. In PepsiCo, the design is done by keeping efficiency and productivity in mind. For this reason, there are more spaces for the movement of people, materials, and information within the organization.
Supply Chain and Inventory Management: This particular area pays attention to operations management practices that make it possible for the supply chain to match demands for materials and products. The approach of PepsiCo is to diversify and disturbte the supply chain hubs. For each market, the company optimizes the supply chain to avoid delays and fluctuations in the services. The primary concerns of the company inventory management are automation, planning, scheduling, adequacy, and minimizing costs. All these actions are carried out with computerized monitoring of the inventory. The data can be accessed easily by the inventory managers at any time to make better decisions.
Maintenance: The maintenance concerns of the company are varied due to the vast area of products and market. The primary concern of this area is to focus on a enough workforce to carry out all the operations and various other resources that grow along with the business. The company continues to hire individuals from time to time to promote its business and expand its workforce (Church,et al, 2021). The company selects and hires talented individuals that help in achieving high-performance excellence. The company also takes notice of other maintenance issues that disturb the operations and manufacturing and causes delays in delivering the products. The company strives to solve the problems in a short time to maintain its excellence.
Management and leadership
The factors that contribute to the management of an organization include planning, organizing, leading, and controlling. Planning involves defining the goals and establishing strategies to achieve those goals. This also involves the identification of different opportunities to help achieve those goals. The organization is focusing on the current statistics and noting down whether the current products are giving profit and market share to the organization. The company hired new and skillful people to improve the performance of the organization. The company also carried out a market analysis because it has a huge impact on the business.
Talented and experienced people help in better communication with the business leaders and stakeholders. Stakeholders are at ease knowing that they are getting clear information from that talented people who are involved in the planning process. The company has initiated diversity management and has successfully introduced a step towards increasing the trend of multinational companies in the course of entering the new markets successfully (Thomas & Creary,2009). The corporate social responsibility that is highlighted in the vision statement of the company says, “Performance with Purpose”. The company was aware of the importance of diversity management since its creation. The first diversity management step was taken by forming a group of minority employees resource groups. The company also has hired a diverse workforce to grab new customers.
Different employees were present in each resource and seniors’ group which helped to expose different issues and needs of each group. The performance indicator revealed that it resulted in positive outcomes. The employees in the company are free to share their ideas and opinions. Through that direct communication, the unnecessary layers are eliminated. The new workforce has innovative ideas that are helping to acquire maximum market share. There is direct management between the seniors and other employee groups so that the employees can easily talk about their issues with the management. The corporate culture has given confidence to all the employees and they can easily communicate with the senior staff. As a result of this, each employee feels valued (Church,et al, 2021). The recruitments are done on talent and expertise and the company is looking to hire more talented and skilled people to acquire high performance and maximum market share.
This is helping the company in making its way towards transformational leadership. This will support diverse management and to unlock Performance potentials. This will also change the views of the people in the way they see themselves, their organization, the limits, responsibilities, and how they see others. This will provide skills to the workforce that are important for the success of the company (Church, 2019). The employees will attend a series of learning sessions and they will notice their performance and improvement during these sessions and the way their performance will have an impact on the success of the business. These employees will then collaborate with other like-minded leaders in similar operating conditions.
Technology
PepsiCo is investing in digital technologies and robotics to improve its distribution to retailers. The company has taken many new initiatives to incorporate technology in its supply chain. For instance, Frito-Lay has brought more technology in its distribution networks that are currently serving more than 300,000 retailers. The company is also using artificial intelligence technologies to further boost its business ("PepsiCo Incorporates More Technology in Supply Chain", 2021). One such technology is Snack Bot that is an artificial intelligence-powered robot from which the students can order different snacks and beverages. The technology was installed after a positive response from the customers and the company has now three to five operating machines to keep up with the demands.
The company is also using AI technology in the manufacturing of its famous potato chips. The brand wanted to develop a method that could help maintain the texture of the chips without human effort. So, for this purpose, it has developed a new laser sensor array that could bounce beams of light off the finished chips and then use AI technology to process. Another process is still under development and it will measure the percentage of peel after the peeling process. By this, the company will optimize the potato peeling process.
The company has also decided to launch a global training program on machine learning, computer vision, and artificial intelligence for its internal research and development. The company will enhance the abilities of its employees to use these technologies for making the manufacturing process more efficient.
The company has also hired robots to interview the job candidates. The robot was developed by a Russian company that is capable of taking interviews of 1500 candidates in nine hours. This is time efficient because humans typically use more time for interviewing this many candidate. Advanced speech recognition tools from Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Russian technology will allow making calls and video calls to the candidates for open positions in the company. The software can scan CVs to match the right expertise for the vacant position.
Politics
The political factors define that which ingredients can and cannot be used in the products. There are different health and quality effects associated with the manufacturing of the products. These standards are set by the government and if an organization fails to meet these standards then the government puts a heavy fine on them. Moreover, there must be proper waste management keeping in mind the greenhouse effect. If a company changes their procedures, then it is important to inform the government. PepsiCo is meeting all these standards of health, safety, and waste management. It provides complete information on the ingredients that it uses in the products to guarantee customer satisfaction. The company is concerned about the health of its customers therefore it uses the best quality products in its manufacturing process.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it is clear from the above discussion that the company follows all the six dimensions of knowledge management to maintain its high-performance excellence. The culture of the organization is diverse, and it promotes the employees based on their talent and expertise. The company is giving chance to more talented people so that it acquires more success in the coming years. There is a collaboration between the team members. The employees are free to communicate with the senior's staff members and due to this reason, they feel valued. the company is trying to maintain all the organizational processes including, manufacturing, maintenance, distribution, and others. The company is continuously improving its standards to obtain the maximum market share, and this is becoming more possible due to the hiring of a talented and expert workforce. The company is also making use of new technological tools to speed up its operations and compete with its competitors in the market. It is also meeting the standards set by the government such as manufacturing healthy snacks and beverages, proper waste management and it provides complete information about the ingredient that is used in its products.
References[edit]
References
Duffy, J. (2000). The KM technology infrastructure. Information Management, 34(2), 62. Wiig, K. M. (1997). Knowledge management: an introduction and perspective. Journal of knowledge Management. Lopes Ferreira, C., & Pilatti, L. A. (2013). Analysis of the seven dimensions of knowledge management in organizations. Journal of technology management & innovation, 8, 5-5.
Church, A. H., Rotolo, C. T., Shull, A. C., & Tuller, M. D. (2014). Understanding the role of organizational culture and workgroup climate in core people development processes at PepsiCo. In The Oxford handbook of organizational climate and culture. Church, A. H., Guidry, B. W., Dickey, J. A., & Scrivani, J. A. (2021). Is there potential in assessing for high-potential? Evaluating the relationships between performance ratings, leadership assessment data, designated high-potential status and promotion outcomes in a global organization. The Leadership Quarterly, 101516.
Church, A. H. (2019). Building an integrated architecture for leadership assessment and development at PepsiCo. In Evidence-Based Initiatives for Organizational Change and Development (pp. 492-505). IGI Global. Thomas, D. A., & Creary, S. J. (2009). Meeting the diversity challenge at PepsiCo: The Steve Reinemund era. Harvard Business School Case, August, 410-424.
PepsiCo Incorporates More Technology in Supply Chain. Convenience.org. (2021). Retrieved 26 April 2021, from https://www.convenience.org/Media/Daily/2018/Apr/ND0423186_PepsiCo-Incorporates-More-Technology-in.
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