Connor Formed Metal Products Knowledge Management

Another interesting article is Connor Formed Metal Products by L. Applegate, D. Stoddard, and M. Conrad. This article talked about the manager Sloss’ open mindedness and willing to give the “blue collar” employees a voice took the company to the next level with using information systems. By giving the employees who were on the floor the ability to enter annotations about a job and to let the upper management know of prospective problems or give solutions elevated the company’s progress. Even though the Sloss implemented this in type of knowledge management in the Los Angeles Plant, he didn’t in all the rest of the plants. In my opinion this will cause the pathology of “knowledge is power”. I think he figured that since the Los Angeles Plant is the biggest then it was the only one in need of this, but if he would have took the time out to have training sessions on the technology in each of the other plants, he could have gradually implemented the system in those as well. Like Nucor Corporation, Sloss could have done manager rotation. Sending top level managers to other plants to implement the same think they have in the Los Angeles Plant.

Sloss’ focus on making quality products was ethically the right idea, but it may have cost Connor revenue. Due to Connor’s competitors both nationally and internationally, Sloss had to find a niche’ which was 100% quality. I think that by Connor having so many competitors who were much larger than them could have the same focus of 100% quality, but I also feel that there was no uniqueness factor in this niche. This was easily duplicated and accessible. The larger competitors also had more revenue to put behind making perfect products. In order for Connor to gain the upper hand on these companies they should have expanded to using refurbished goods, like Nucor using the scrap metal.

Connor was a great company to be employed by because of all the incentives, but I feel as though the rewards were much greater than the risks. Connor was giving the employees a chance to be stock holders, but stock was given away too often. The “stretch-goals” that Nucor used for their system would have been ideal here.

I think that the managers should have played more of a role in goal setting and monitoring the employees. It would have given the company a better idea of what innovations could improve productivity.