Structured knowledge transfer for the implementation of a new engineering service centre in India: Results from a captive offshoring project in the automotive supplier industry

Abstract

Organizations are continuously confronted with stress of competition. The search for lower operational costs is no longer limited to the manufacturing and information technology field and has been extended to engineering services as well. For comprehensible reasons more and more tasks in the engineering service sector are shifted towards India. Along with this, international companies plan at least partly to transfer firm-specific knowledge towards India so that knowledge management has become a key success factor for the performance of plants or subsidiaries in India. This contribution focuses on a research project dealing with the knowledge transfer processes of a global automotive tier 1 supplier to its joint venture in Pune, India. Knowledge transfer processes as part of a holistic knowledge management approach were essential for the success of these off-shoring activities. The major goal of this contribution is to show how this offshoring project was carried out from a knowledge management point of view. This provides deeper insights into the course of action related to knowledge transfer processes between the two locations in the US and India. An internally developed knowledge transfer model leveraged a combination of experienced resources from the joint venture, with task based training and documentation of knowledge and practical cross cultural orientation and assimilation of teams to quickly initiate the new operation. Finally the paper will demonstrate how an above average steady state level can be reached by progress tracking and feedback mechanisms. Furthermore the paper will provide a brief overview of the existing theoretical dominant factors of successful knowledge transfer which were distilled out of empirical studies and prior research in this field. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011.