Enhancing knowledge management with business intelligence - A case study

Knowledge management provides companies with a means to support their business goals by providing an explicit representation of the knowledge of the staffers. This knowledge can then be used by co-workers or by expert systems to solve future problems. A great disadvantage lies in the large expenses and difficulties to make implicit knowledge accessible and distributable. Furthermore, great parts of the knowledge and the authority of the employees are purely based on empirical experiences, therefore leading to uncertainties whether this experience-based knowledge is correct. In the project RESOV, the company AGETO and the University of Applied Sciences Zwickau have represented the experiences and the knowledge for the sale of products on public market places in an expert system, in order to provide forecasts for the best placement of a commodity. Additionally, the available sales data and possible influencing factors on customer behaviour were collected with Business Intelligence techniques. Based on these data, classification numbers are currently developed to provide retailers with easily useable information, thus enhancing the quality of the forecasts.