Fragmented knowledge in collaborative manufacturing process chains

Knowledge is a key element of today's manufacturing companies in running, maintaining and continuously improving their processes. Centralized management approaches face the challenge of accessing and utilizing existing knowledge, as it is generated in numerous places throughout the manufacturing process chain. As this problem already exists within single organizations, it aggravates in networked production. To provide a structured analysis of knowledge fragmentation in a collaborative manufacturing environment, this paper presents an approach based on transforming the Johari Window for inter-organizational use. It sheds light on the state-of-the-art from a new perspective and presents future research challenges.