...5: Knowledge Management Assignment 2 Consistency and efficiency drive savings. Each in their own way, Nestle, Pella, and Volkswagen were delinquent of this. They were self-impaired by their current processes (or lack of) and legacy systems. All three recognized the opportunities by investing in a new Knowledge Management system. They would be able to integrate the current systems which would bring transparency and visibility to the entire business. Nestle had 200 operating companies and subsidiaries in 8 countries, all running independently. Redundancies such as the different coding and 29 different prices of vanilla demonstrated this and the opportunities that would benefit Nestle in becoming one highly integrated company. They wanted to leverage these and introduce economies of scale. By implementing common systems, they would create savings through volume buying and facilitate data sharing. Pella had aging, incompatible IT systems which were unreliable and becoming expensive to maintain. They desired full visibility of the company: an end-to-end integration of business processes. By replacing their incompatible legacy systems, Pella’s vision was to harmonize sales, service, and manufacturing. Integration across the entire business would allow visibility across the entire organization resulting in optimization and synchronism between the departments. Volkswagen was a global company with highly localized and departmental processes and systems. The lack of common processes...
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...Nestle, Pella and Volkswagen's common issue is the lack of knowledge sharing between internal business units. They all simularily share a vision to leverage technology to integrate information and processes to be more responsive to a rapidly changing supplier environment. All three companies wanted implementation of new technology systems to streamline workflow giving employees easy access to information in order to focus on higher value tasks. These companies require a knowledge management system to simplify and automate processes where employees and suppliers capture, assess, analyze and use information to support more effective decision making. Nestle had multiple purchasing systems and no formal processes of tracking ice cream flavors, orders or volumes. Non of the groups that were going to be directly affected by the new processes and systems were represented on the key stakeholders team. In its haste to unify the company's separate brands, the project team had essentially replaced divisional silos with process silos. Nestle focused on installing software but did not focus on changing business processes and achieving universal buy-in. Nestle learned the hard way that an enterprisewide rollout involves much more than simple installying software. Pella wants to create visibility and achieve interplant synchronyzation to create better scheduling higher labour productivity and lower inventories. Pella's manufactuing plants operate very efficiently but as silos. The...
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