Investigation of communities of practice in a harmonized supply chain ERP landscape

Sammanfattning: This Master thesis is investigating how communities of practice can enhance knowledge sharing in a context of improving a harmonized Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system used in supply chain. A student from the faculty of production and materials engineering at Lund university (LTH) collaborated with the Global Trinity organization from Alfa Laval (Lund, Sweden) to answer the research question. The global Trinity Organization is the department in charge of delivering IT solution across the Swedish manufacturing company’s supply chain to improve the organization’s value stream. An investigation of two business units (BU) from Alfa Laval was conducted in order to compare their level of maturity regarding communities of practice, but also their supply chain ERPs. The BUs that were used are the gasketed plate heat exchanger (GPHE) and the decanter (DEC) BU. It has been concluded that each BU confirmed that CoP does contribute to knowledge sharing and improving their ERP more efficiently. However, there are also some differences as the GPHE BU is much more mature in terms of CoP and harmonized ERP. Based on the finding made during interviews with various stakeholders from the Global Trinity organization, GPHE and DEC BU, several recommendations were provided in the discussion section in order to better improve CoPs which will lead to a better harmonized ERP landscape. Furthermore, this project is a qualitative research which means that future work should be conducted as a limited amount of literature reviews regarding organizational concepts were used to build some theory related to communities of practice, and change management.