Knowledge Management Tools and Techniques: Extent of Use in Organizations and Support for Modularization

Paper in proceeding, 2015

Customers always hold a lot of needs and requirements that are essential to undertake during every design decision. One way to meet these different needs and generate product family members that all have some commonality are by modularization and platform based product development (PBPD). Modularization and PBPD strongly deal with knowledge management (KM) and considerable slice of the knowledge of the company is included in the products and can be reused in the earlier stages of the development. Literature describes several KM tools that have the ability to support organizations in their product development process. Despite organizations recognize more and more knowledge as a strategic lever that can be used and managed, it is not still clear the role of KM as a support for modularization and standardization. Therefore, this paper contributes to the discussion on how knowledge management can serves as leverage for modularization. First, it defines general KM techniques and tools, and by looking at 103 organizations it also shows how well they are used. Secondly, via statistical analysis significant relationships of variables representing the KM tools and modularization are shown.