Development of a procedure for knowledge enhancement and transfer to increase efficiency of automotive sales teams

Abstract

Knowledge management application on team level within automotive sales teams, working from a 2nd tier position! Motivated by many year s of practical experience, it was most challenging to try to manage the tradeoff between philosophy and theory and practical application of knowledge management within an MBA Master Thesis. One of the first challenges was to validate whether knowledge management is recognized as a contributor to company and team performance. This worked out, with a remarkable portion of effort, because knowledge management has still no independent focus within corporate structures in most companies. And, if structures are available, in most cases they are located on corporate level and therefore too generic to be applied in practice. This was t he reason to take care that all measures, later on defined procedural steps, can be applied on team level independent of any corporate structures. The structure of the thesis goes stringent from introduction, analysis of the state of the art, development of the procedure to validation. In order to validate the developed procedure, the quote lead time has been defined as KPI. The methodical approach is based on the analysis of the state of the art, as well as the investigation of a possible application towards enhancement and transfer of knowledge. Based on that, a procedure for automotive sales teams has been developed. After outlining the basic s of theory and the basic structure of the thesis itself, the setup of a 2nd tier sales team application is described, followed by a more critical section explaining the barriers of knowledge management and discussing centralism and process adherence versus knowledge responsibility. In order to make sure that the developed procedure can realistically exploit the whole potential all areas of the firm with their related aspects regarding knowledge enhancement have been investigated. Finally, the developed procedure has been validated based on an interview methodology. The major expectation that the application of an overall procedure to enhance and transfer knowledge aiming the increase of efficiency of automotive sales teams significantly, has been confirmed.