The Impact Of Supply Chain Knowledge Sharing On Product Development Performance

Under the circumstance of economic globalization, as well as various and individualized demands of customers, all the apparel enterprises have faced the increasing market competition. They badly need to improve their ability of new product development in order to obtain more competitive advantages and market value. New product development is viewed as an activity with great risk which is highly relied on cooperation, but company's own power is fairly not enough, effectively using external resources is a must. More and more apparel enterprises realized that if the fellow suppliers could participate in the process of new product developing, which will be very helpful for apparel companies to cover the shortage of information resource or technical knowledge. Besides, problems of design melioration, boosting product quality, reducing cost and shortening the cycle of new product development can be solved at the same time. According to the inherent requirements in apparel products exploitation and using for reference the successful experiences of other industries, knowledge sharing theory is introduced into apparel manufacturing management for systematic research, this paper introduced the knowledge sharing theory into apparel manufacturing management, in order to find out the foundation of knowledge sharing effected on the performance of new product development using exploratory individual case study method.Currently, the researches about the influence of organizational knowledge sharing level and knowledge sharing effect on performance of new product development on apparel new product development is still few. For the sake of discussing this aspect in-depth, this paper using exploratory individual case study method, through analysis four apparel businesses with independent brand, concerning the interview contents from R&D persons from those four companies, using the method of code transcription and code statistic, preliminarily discussed some factors which impact the level of new products knowledge sharing when supplier involved in the procedure of developing new products. Meanwhile, the knowledge sharing level affect on new product development performance is also discussed. Based on all those above, a framework for knowledge sharing on product development performance was built.It is found that the level of knowledge sharing between suppliers and apparel enterprise mainly affected by trust, commitment, relationship joint degree, shared motives, shared ability difference, etc. And knowledge sharing level in deed has certain effect on product level, customer accept, enterprise level in new product development performance. Aiming at solving the knowledge sharing backward situation, this paper summarizes six suggestions as follow: establishing an effective incentive mechanism; building an enterprise knowledge sharing level evaluation system; forming a knowledge sharing alliance culture; installing a knowledge sharing platform; cultivating and maintaining credit for knowledge sharing among partner enterprises; setting up an available communication mechanism; enhancing enterprises' own organization learning capacity.This paper has studied how to advance new apparel product development performance on the angle of knowledge sharing. Devote to appeal apparel enterprises to pay much more attention to knowledge management. Based on the research conclusions, provided some advises for promoting knowledge sharing level and new product development performance. In the end, the author proposed some proposals for apparel corporations and future researches.