Decision Support System Based on Effective Knowledge Management Framework To Process Customer Order Enquiry

The customer enquiry stage in a business management environment is very challenging as it strongly influences future workload of production management activity. At this stage, customers generally make enquiries requesting product delivery in terms of quantity, delivery date and sales price. Firms usually need to respond to these enquiries before customers can confirm the corresponding quotes and finally the enquiries may be translated into customer orders. A firm’s potential profitability depends crucially on selecting a proper subset of enquiries to fulfill, delay or turn away. Such a decision is the responsibility of the sales and marketing department. However, it is the customer who makes the final decision as to whether to order or not and how many to order, based largely on the satisfaction derived from the enquiry. At present, there are very few, efficient, and effective, simple and easy to implement methodologies, to help businesses manage existing in house knowledge in order to respond to ordering enquiries at the customer enquiry stage. Literature review (Harris, 2009) shows that: • Existing management systems do not support all key activities within the enterprise product development process. • Only a few systems provide the necessary decision support throughout product development and in most cases are more geared to specific tasks with stand alone functionality. • Few decision support management systems provide the means for the exploitation of manufacturing constraints and product knowledge • Available knowledge management systems do not provide the means to identify, capture, formalise, present and utilise tacit knowledge • The lack of exploitation of information and knowledge has a major impact on overall product development process • Knowledge and experiences gained from existing projects are sometimes poorly documented and therefore are not available for reuse in other related projects