Knowledge Management Tarsam Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management

Tarsam Knowledge Management System

Consumer electronics is an industry known for very rapid product lifecycles, complex products, and the tendency to continually churn through retail sales personnel. This last dynamic occurs because the training on product is often lacking, incomplete or just wrong. What is needed is a comprehensive Web content management system that can be accessible by all of Tarsam's employees across the 7 stores on a 24/7 basis. This Web content management system must also have the ability to be accessed via the Internet from their homes so they can continue to learn about the latest products. It is highly recommended that a change management program be put into place to encourage and motivate all employees to continually learn about the latest products (Goodwin, Burford, Bedard, Carrigan, Hannigan, 2006). Posting the results of the training and testing sessions online, via the corporate Intranet is a practice many retailers rely on to give employees recognition for their accomplishments. This also creates a very high level of positive competition in a company, as employees want to out-learn each other and when that happens, the customers win (Goodwin, Burford, Bedard, Carrigan, Hannigan, 2006).

Situation Analysis

For Tarsam, time is both an asset and enemy. It is an asset when Tarsam gets the latest generation of electronics products before anyone in their city or region of the world, complete with complete documentation and training materials. It is a liability when the company has to fight to get even the most basic information about products. Unfortunately given the pace of the consumer electronics market, the latter is often the case. For Tarsam, they must turn time into a competitive force by alleviating the lag time of getting a new consumer electronics product and the training to sell and support it. Web content management systems are today being used pervasively throughout the consumer electronics industry to streamline knowledge transfer from manufacturers to retailers on a global scale (Jong, Wu, Li, 2011). Tarsam is missing out on the competitive advantages of integrating into the consumer electronics' manufacturer's systems, allowing time to turn into a liability instead of an asset.

What's also missing from Tarsam today is the ability to coordinate more complex transactions that are critical to the growth of the business, in addition to supporting the development of a company-wide system of record. A system of record provides a foundation for synchronizing the many strategies essential for the growth of the company (Pennington, 2007). As Tarsam has grown organically to seven stores, the processing workloads on the accounting, HR, marketing, sales, service and supply chain systems continue to escalate. As the original systems for each of these areas was designed to support only a few stores, the existing processes and systems in place for unifying these diverse departments needs to be re-designed.

Solution Recommendations

Retailers are continually battling tight timeframes to learn more about their products and take on the latest items so they don'[t lose sales to faster-moving competitors. For Tarsam, this is especially a challenge given the highly distributed nature of their 7 locations and 60 employees. Tarsam is in a knowledge race with their competitors and need to have a far greater level of assimilation of information to beat out other chains and win new customers. The following recommendations are predicated on the need to create a high level of credibility for Tarsam with its existing customers and potential new ones. One of the most valuable benefits of a retailer having a Web content management system designed to integrate to consumer electronics manufacturers is the ability to learn faster than its competitors (Lam, Lo, 2009). Tarsam needs to make this a very high priority to gain the trust of their customers, and the credibility to win new prospects over to purchasing from then. There are three approaches the company can take to accomplish this.

The first option is to create a self-managed Web content management system that Tarsam completely creates on their own. Defining a system administrator for it, the it aspects of the system would be managed internally. A marketing manager or supervisor would be given responsibility for keeping the content from consumer products manufacturers current. The data from manufacturers would be sent via Federal Express or comparable courier. This approach would be well-suited for the remote locations of the chain. The design and implementation of a Web content management system designed to educate and inform must be agile enough to respond to many departments' needs while having a consistent approach for integrating the latest information available (Pennington, 2007). This is a low-cost option yet extremely slow by standards of consumer electronics retailing today (Jong, Wu, Li, 2011). Tarsam also needs a Web content management system and learning system to create greater communication and collaboration across these departments. One of the best approaches to defining how these various systems will work in conjunction with each other is to define a value stream map of processes across each, highlighting the integration points and required system inputs and connection points (Goodwin, Burford, Bedard, Carrigan, Hannigan, 2006).

The second approach is to create a Web-based application in HTML that can integrate to the specific websites of consumer products manufacturers and screen scrape the specific product information of interest. Screen scraping is a common technique of Web content management systems designed on the HTML standard, relying on a Web front-end interface (Jong, Wu, Li, 2011). This approach is also very low-cost yet also very resource-intensive to keep current and updated with the best possible information (Jong, Wu, Li, 2011).