Knowledge management in 21st century manufacturing

As markets have become global, more and more manufacturing companies achieve global operations through various strategic business alliances including joint ventures and outsourcing, etc. Since manufacturing has become global to address the needs of the global market, companies take advantage of advanced information technologies in achieving their global supply chain. It is not enough to just establish an integrated information system such as enterprise resource planning (ERP); it is also important to see to what extent this has been used to facilitate innovation and knowledge diffusion along the supply chain for an ultimate improvement of productivity and quality and in turn manufacturing organizational competitiveness. Without the integration of people and information technology/information systems (IT/IS), it is very hard to achieve any significant improvement in organizational performance. However, there are not many articles or reports that deal with knowledge management in advanced manufacturing organizations. Advanced manufacturing enterprises are characterized by a physically distributed enterprise environment, outsourcing and IT-enabled supply chain management (SCM). This paper makes an attempt to review the literature available on knowledge management (KM) in manufacturing with the objective of identifying the gap between theory and practice, strategies and techniques for KM systems in advanced manufacturing environments. The literature on KM in manufacturing has been reviewed using a suitable classification scheme with the objective of developing a framework for managing knowledge in manufacturing and suggesting some future research directions.