E-Sourcing Forum » The Sourcing Knowledge Center

The Sourcing Knowledge Center

October 28th, 2008 at 05:51am Oscar Pacheco - Iasta

In a past position I held, I remember our CEO hiring a consultant that specialized in Knowledge Management to help our company become much better at retaining and sharing the collective knowledge of our global organization. Just like most business / process improvement concepts the idea behind this was very solid and worthwhile, but the implementation was going to be costly and time consuming. The implementation consisted of software / hardware costs for a system to store and provide access to the knowledge, resources to gather and categorize the knowledge (documents, presentation, reports, white papers, etc), and the cost to maintain and organize all the information. It was amazing how much information a young company like ours could generate in a short amount of time (we were only 7 years old). Instead of jumping in all the way, which was not possible due to budget and resource constraints, the consultant recommended we start slowly by creating a document repository in a shared space on our network and had all contributors of information help with categorizing the information.

It was not the best solution, but it moved us in a positive direction and helped develop a practice among our company to share knowledge.

Sourcing groups can certainly take the lead in a company by developing a shared knowledge mindset and backing that with a central information repository. From a sourcing prospective this could contain RFQ/RFP documents, RFIs, Standard T&Cs, Best Practice Processes, commodity reports, white papers, procedures, reports, contracts, etc. This information is very valuable and extremely useful in improving both the effectiveness and efficiency of a sourcing group and allows some of the knowledge built up within the people to be shared.

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Entry Filed under: General, Supply Management Best Practices

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