Performance and control problems in Product knowledge management

If you don't know where you are going, how can you expect to go there?" This quote is the basic concept of a new trend called product knowledge management. Product knowledge refers to a deep and thorough understanding of the product in which the company is dealing.

Understanding each and every aspect and from everyone's perspective is very essential, as knowing your product means increased profit to the company. Managing this knowledge is very essential for the organization. For this, KPIs can be a good approach. These acts as a balancing tool by helping the organization to carry out its core objectives. These KPIs can be used to develop a balanced scorecard.

KPIs provide a holistic view of the business. Financial perspective includes KPIs such as percentage increase in product training cost and percentage savings in the operational cost. KPIs such as percentage decrease in number of complaints, percentage increase in number of repeat customers, etc. are included in the customer perspective. Internal processes perspective deals with such KPIs as number of new models of the existing products, success rate of new products, number of product knowledge management systems installed, etc. Innovation perspective comprises of KPIs like number of external knowledge links, number of product design sessions, etc.

Product knowledge management is an upcoming trend. Although, it has been adopted by a number of companies but not all these companies are enjoying its benefits. The main reason behind this failure is the organization's incapability of meeting the confronted challenges. One of the major challenge is customers' perception. This means that if the organization, after analyzing the latest scenario, has adopted this trend for managing a particular type of knowledge and suddenly, the scenario gets changed, then surely that organization will have to face a loss. Its market position will decline definitely. Another challenge with product knowledge management is that companies use this complementary tool for their own benefit without considering the customer perspective. This factor may develop an organization internally but it can loss its relevance in the outside market. Organizations are required to cope up with such challenges so as to attain maximum benefits from product knowledge management.

Once product knowledge management is implemented, its results should be analyzed properly. This can be done with the help of key performance indicators (KPIs). These quantifiable metrics makes an organization strategy and goal focussed by helping it in defining practical and achievable objectives. With these indicators, it is possible to measure the organization's progress towards these pre-determined objectives. These KPIs can be categorized into such several classes as quantitative, practical, directional, and actionable, and the organization can opt them as per their convenience and requirement.

This means that product knowledge management; although a profitable and effective method but it needs to be analyzed thoroughly so that the organizations using it will always get benefited without exploiting their valuable assets. For this, organizations can use key performance indicators so as to measure their progress towards pre-defined objectives and also to find out the areas in which they are lying behind than their competitors. In this way, it can be very easy for the organizations to meet the very much prevailing competition in the business world.