'BP’s Competitive Advantage\r'

'Though the product they be probably most famous for in the minds of consumers, gasoline, is thought of as homogeneous, the success of BP in the companies ability to grow and maintain its standing(a) as a multinational faculty superpower lies in its circumspection of ground capital. BP’s true competitive expediency is not in the commodities or work it sells, their success stems from the companies ability to manage a less easily duplicated resource: knowledge.\r\n collaborationism and knowledge management form the marrow squash of the BP value system. As expressed by BP in their own words, they aim â€Å"to take up the creative talents of our employees, and develop and apply leading, cost-efficient technology and intellectual creativity to arouse innovation and new ideas” (BP, n. d. ). This paper entrust address this unique aspect of the BP transaction model, knowledge management, and how it translates into financial performance. Background\r\nBP is a globa l energy leader, the core components of their agate line are: oil colour and gas exploration and production, refining and marketing of petroleum append products, manufacturing and marketing of chemicals, and the manufacture of Photovoltaic (solar) cells. They are currently in the top troika internation tout ensembley in gas reserves, and are the largest retailer of gas in the US, as well as one of the world’s largest marketers of aviation fuel (Corporate Watch, n. d. ).\r\nFounded by William Knox D’Arcy from a significant oil find in Iran, they have spread out through growth and merger, currently run in over 100 countries, employing 97,600 battalion with 2007 revenues exceeding $284 billion (BP, n. d. ). Knowledge counseling The challenge to an organization the size and desktop of BP can often be capturing the riches of knowledge created by their people, engaged in line, accomplishment best practices, and sharing and storing that instruction between heada che units to maximize BP’s potential.\r\nBP’s methodology is â€Å"encompassed by a simple framework, which describes a encyclopaedism steering wheel †before, during and after any event †which is support by simple swear out tools” (Kotelnikov, n. d. , ¶ 1). The BP learning method is to treat every process as a closed learning loop; lessons learned from each association are agreed upon and posted on the party intranet to buzz off knowledge and follow through to be shared by all BP stock units. Companies create vast amounts of worthy knowledge through practice of their employees, without a system in place to capture this knowledge; it will often provide with their employees.\r\nFurther, in a large company like BP, the potential exists for it to operate not as a collaborative unit, moreover as â€Å"a collection of idiosyncratic fiefdoms in the form of individual business units” (Quelch & Deshpande, 2004, p. 96). To foster this s ense of collaborative behavior, BP created peer review and cross business unit interaction strategies (Quelch & Deshpande). An warning of how this has positively impacted the companies profitability, recently out-of-pocket to knowledge sharing between business units of engineers, they achieved a cost savings of $74 million in 1998 to meet their bodied goal of reducing retail situate construction by 10% (SAIC, n. . ).\r\nAs management of information systems flourished in the ten of the 1990’s, the success of BP’s competitive avail in their commitment to managing knowledge will invariably lead to other organizations creating practices and root word to support knowledge management in the future tense. Knowledge management creates competitive return by storing and sharing collective â€Å"on the job” learned experiences and distributing them to present and future generations of an organization that would otherwise be lost. BP has keep their ability to grow and improve profitability through implementation of knowledge management strategy.\r\n'