Leveraging organizational knowledge to formulate manufacturing strategy

This paper describes a web-based system that integrates knowledge management and decision-making features to enable short-term communities of practice develop manufacturing strategy. The system is based on a well-defined model of the problem domain, which builds on organizational activities and resources and their association with the main strategic objectives of the manufacturing function (i.e., cost, flexibility, dependability, speed and quality). Managers involved in the strategy development process may assert their positions towards the issue under consideration, while they may also argue in favor or against positions set by their peers. By stimulating knowledge elicitation, the system captures the informal organizational memory and rationale, and builds a well-structured knowledge graph. In addition, exploiting reasoning mechanisms triggered each time a user inserts a new piece of knowledge in the graph, the system is able to recommend a solution at each dialogue instance. The overall framework proposed in this paper can be used for distributed, asynchronous collaboration for strategy formulation, allowing users to surpass the requirements of being in the same place and working at the same time.