KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT PRACTICES IN APPAREL SECTOR

Abstract

Apparel industry has become a premier foreign exchange earner of some developing countries including Sri Lanka. The manufacturers are facing tremendous pressure in the global market place and keen in implementing various performance improvement tools such as lean manufacturing, TQM and Six Sigma. Even though knowledge management (KM) has gained the popularity as a tool for enhancing performance, it seems KM is not much popular in the apparel sector. This research investigates the current status of knowledge management practices in apparel sector. A questionnaire survey along with some interviewing was carried out among 32 large scale manufacturers. Even though Knowledge Management is a novel concept in low tech labour intensive industries 60% of the respondents indicates that they are practicing knowledge management in their organizations. 20% respondents states that they have not heard about KM. Among the influential factors on knowledge management the apparel sector believes that people are more influential than technology and knowledge management process. Majority (60%) of the apparel companies have not understood implicit or tacit knowledge. Even though 40% of the companies are knowledgeable about tacit knowledge only 22.5% are aware of knowledge transfer process from tacit to explicit. However, none of them have formal process to convert tacit knowledge in explicit knowledge.