The complexities of supply chain and logistics management spring from myriad sources, many of which are recurring and relatively predictable; it’s mostly the way that multiple factors and elements interact with each other that causes trouble.

This is why, over the past few years, there’s been an increasing emphasis on capturing and organizing the pockets — large and small — of expertise, experience and know-how that reside in the minds of a broad array of workers within an organization. In other words, knowledge management. 

“In my mind, knowledge management sits at the intersection of people, process, company culture, content and technology. All of those are very important, especially in supply chain and logistics, because it’s a rapidly moving business,” says Ben Little, CEO of Bloomfire, a knowledge management software company. “They don’t have the luxury of being pensive and pausing to think. They have to get a truckload of lettuce out the door. They figure out how to do things on the fly.”

A warehouse manager, say, who falls sick, or leaves, or just goes on vacation, often thereby removes critical knowledge from the organization’s shared wisdom, exposing gaps, Little says. “When you have a knowledge management platform, you minimize those gaps.”

Little sees three broad areas of business that benefit most directly from a well-designed knowledge management system.

First, it gives sales personnel an easily-accessed set of data on every potential customer. “They don’t have to remember a whole bunch of stuff. The system has a perfect memory,” Little says. 

Similarly, there’s a rich cache of information about existing customers and previous interactions that is available any time that customer calls in, or there’s a problem. A knowledge management platform can significantly reduce the amount of time it takes to handle an incoming query. 

And thirdly, knowledge management helps turbo-charge research and insights. “This is a very data-rich business. There are lots of trends and events. Upper management needs to be an oracle, to know all the things that are happening,” says Little, pointing to the capabilities of a knowledge management platform to categorize this type of data and make it easy to retrieve. “Because sometimes our memories fail us,” he says. 

But there’s also a compelling argument that knowledge management helps onboard and retain workers. Jessica McLaughlin, training manager at 3PL Giltner, which uses the Bloomfire platform, says the time it takes to train new employees has fallen from three weeks to one since the company implemented the technology.

“I’m very passionate about empowering your employees, no matter what industry you’re in,” says McLaughlin. “Employees stay with companies that give them all the tools and resources they need to do their job. When I, on Day One, show new hires our Bloomfire site, I see them relaxing and realizing that the company has got them, and is going to give them the resources they need.”

Little advises anyone thinking of formalizing their collective organizational knowledge and putting it into a single knowledge management system to recognize that knowledge is both an asset and a liability.

“Knowledge is important, but you have to be sure you’re applying it to specific business goals and objectives, where you can measure the result or non-result. That can be tied as an asset,” Little says. And the liability comes when you get it wrong, with data that is outdated, or redundant, or, as Little says, “some half-done piece of work that someone just put on the cloud.”

Little favors what he refers to as “intelligent storage” that seeks out and flags data that conflicts with other data, or is duplicative and therefore confusing. He’s also wary of artificial intelligence as a cure-all. “When you put AI on top of unclean data, you could have bad outcomes. But when you put AI on top of a true knowledge system, the result is terrific,” he says. Bloomfire’s technology is constantly on the lookout for ROT, Little says — that is, redundant outdated and trivial information. “AI is not good at determining ROT,” he warns.

McLaughlin's experience at Giltner shows that the benefits of a well-designed and managed knowledge management system go beyond simply being able to capture the quirks of a demanding customer, or the quickest way around a persistent traffic jam. It offers a sense of an organization as a coherent, thinking whole, with a central wealth of shared knowledge. 

McLaughlin says she has put a lot of effort into making sure the 3PL’s employees are fully engaged with the system, breaking down attitudes such as “I already know all that” with constant updates, interactive trainings, videos, engagement surveys, and even a monthly fire drill contest where the company picks a challenge typical to its business and asks employees to solve it. “So, they really are engaging with it,” says McLaughlin. “I try to make it so they can’t help but engage with it.”

McLaughlin says that cutting onboarding time and other measurables are great, but the main thing is that offering a knowledge management platform to all employees demonstrates that Giltner invests in its people, and in making their jobs easier and even more fun. “They feel it immediately. It puts them at ease,” McLaughlin says. “The type of knowledge management system a company has really says something about that company. It breeds that culture of investment in your people, which is so important.”