Role of corporate memory in the global supply chain environment

Abstract

Critical knowledge is proliferated among different knowledge owners of a corporate system through the individuals lying inside or outside the system. Extraction of such knowledge is a very crucial requirement for all organisations. This paper presents the role of critical knowledge in the proper functioning of a system by representing it in the form of eXtensible Markup Language to develop a corporate memory. In order to demonstrate the role of corporate memory in the organisation, a real-world problem of a global supply chain is considered. The problem utilises the concept of corporate memory for the selection of potential suppliers from a set of available suppliers, and further to select the best route from a set of available alternative routes. The objective deals with the minimisation of logistic cost. A fuzzy-based decision-making approach together with the genetic-algorithm-based solution methodology was applied to solve the underlying problem on a set of randomly generated data sets. A comparison between two cases, i.e. the problem with the presence of corporate memory and the problem without corporate memory, was performed. The results obtained reveal the importance of corporate memory in optimising the underlying task (i.e. minimisation of logistic cost). Further, a sensitivity analysis was performed on the various transportation routes to check the deviation in the objective value by varying the problem parameters.