Knowledge management in SMEs: preliminary ideas for a dedicated framework

Abstract

Knowledge is a vital asset for organizations, especially in today's Industry 4.0 context. Knowledge Management (KM), which concerns the activities of knowledge acquisition and exploitation, is relatively well applied in large organizations. However, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) are facing diverse obstacles. Traditional KM methods generally provide a framework that is not adaptable to the SME context, because SMEs present specificities that distinguish them from large organizations. For this reason, a dedicated SME KM process concept is proposed in this contribution. Firstly, in the knowledge acquisition phase, agile methodology, which is widely applied in different domains, is analyzed to define a suitable process for SMEs to acquire the most valuable knowledge. Secondly, in the knowledge exploitation phase, the Recommender System (RS), an emerging and widely used Information Technology (IT) tool, is analyzed to help SMEs exploit the most relevant knowledge for any new business need. This contribution is built in collaboration with a SME company, Axsens-bte, specializing in consultancy and training in supply chain, industrial methods, industry 4.0 and quality management. Axsens-bte allowed us to share their KM experiences to build this contribution. This article aims to present the state-of-the-art in the field of SME KM and preliminary ideas for a dedicated SME KM framework.