An Investigation of Knowledge Flow Barriers within Supply Chain

Abstract

Organizations are being aware that knowledge utilization is necessary to sustain enhanced competitive market, therefore most organizations wish to understand how different supply chain knowledge flow barriers (SCKFBs) which affect its progress.The purpose of this paper is to identify and prioritize the SCKFBs as per their level of importance using fuzzy based analytic hierarchy process (Fuzzy AHP). This paper identifies 26 SCKFBs, prioritizing them as per their importance. The result indicates that out of these twenty six SCKFBs, top SCKFBs are lack of management control systems (SB3), a win-lose negotiation strategy (SB4) and lack of strategic planning (SB1).The result enhance the effectiveness of the organizational knowledge flow implementation within a case study similar of this research.These SCKFBs will contribute a valuable guideline to SC executives who wish to apply successful knowledge flow to improve SC performance. The paper provides a methodology to the practitioners for analyzing SCKFBs with an objective of better implementation of knowledge flow activity.