Intangible Capital

Purpose: Although knowledge and its management is, and has been, studied in depth, particularly since the 90’s decade of the past century, especially for the strategic management, innovation, trade, or business administration, there are still many questions on how it articulates or transfers and the barriers to its management, especially when we talk about internal tactical activities that affect staff that we could call "offices", such as maintenance and industrial assembly or exploitation and conduction of the facilities. Because of the peculiarities normally seen in this kind of activity in the industrial companies, the knowledge of these people is strongly based on their experience (strong tacit component), difficult to measure and articulate, and on many occasions, however, this rupture of information-knowledge, can represent a high cost for the company (often assumed to be something inevitable) due to the increase in production and service downtime, loss of efficiency, or tuning time of new staff to these areas.

Design/methodology/approach: After a description of the State of the art and the basic principles of knowledge management, a qualitative study in an industrial company has been carried out, within the areas of operation and maintenance, in order to know the barriers and facilitators that such involved personnel finds in order to achieve an adequate transmission and use of that knowledge.

Findings and Originality/value: Learn about barriers, facilitators and impact that offers the knowledge management in the areas of industrial maintenance, especially among professionals in offices which operate with a high degree of tacit knowledge and with a heavy dependence on the company on these professionals.

Research limitations/implications: Those characteristics of a qualitative study in a particular area and within a geographical area, although it can be extrapolated to other types of companies and regional areas.

Practical implications: Learn about the barriers and facilitators, facilitates the way in which must develop a model of knowledge management in the area of industrial maintenance, which results in the improvement of the efficiency of the service and decreases the dependence of the company in this strategic area.

Social implications: Union and improvement of the Working Group in industrial maintenance, greater security in critical decision-making, encourage shared knowledge.

Originality/value: This article explores on the principles of the management of knowledge in an area of the company such as industrial maintenance, where there are no full proposals to guide on the factors to take into account for the establishment of a model, that tends to restrict the high tacit knowledge that exists within the working groups of the maintenance engineering, as well as the factors influencing its proper development.