A Model to Document Explicit Knowledge and Codifying Tacit Knowledge: Focused on Know-how in Production Companies

The knowledge experienced in practice, however it basically corresponds to an area of a science in theory, is referred to as know-how. Indeed, know-how is provided by the people skills inferred from the facts of the real cases. Know-how as an action-based knowledge embraces a set of valuable technical information experienced practically by the people worked in the process of product design or manufacturing lines during the time. Hence, the know-how is basically referred to the arena of the tacit knowledge and then explicating the knowledge to the explicit type along with sharing the knowledge is referred to a critical target for pioneer organizations. Codifying the tacit knowledge in a production organization allows the management to replace the individual know-how asset with the organizational know-how asset. Then codifying know-how leading to share the knowledge is known as one of the most important target for the organizations focused on knowledge management. Although several models proposed in literature to manage the knowledge, one is not addressed to mange the know-how experienced by the operational levels of a company. In this paper after a comprehensive literature review focusing on the key factors of success of knowledge management, a practical model is proposed which can effectively help the operational levels of the organization to separate and codify the types of the know-how. Modularity approached in this model allows one managing the explicit knowledge effectively. The quality chain as the core of the model leads the management to share the knowledge using pulling approach. To help the proposed model validation, the capabilities of the proposed model are analyzed for three practical cases.