Case Study: Ancol Corp's Management Issues and Intranet Solutions

This case study examines the management issues at Ancol Corp, particularly the poor employee-management relations resulting from a lack of knowledge management and organizational learning. The analysis highlights how the absence of effective knowledge management systems, such as an intranet, led to increased absenteeism, decreased productivity, and deteriorated relationships. The solution proposed involves implementing an intranet to facilitate knowledge sharing, improve communication, and encourage organizational learning through both explicit and tacit knowledge management. The intranet is designed to provide an intuitive user interface, updated content, decentralization, and department social networks to foster employee participation and knowledge creation. Additionally, the case study explores the use of electronic surveillance to improve attendance tracking and maintain productivity levels. Overall, the implementation of an intranet is suggested as a key strategy to address the identified management deficiencies and improve the overall performance of Ancol Corp.

Based on the case study, the key management issue is the relation between management
and employees were bad which had been noticed by Paul Sims. This is because of the
management of Ancol lack of knowledge management and organizational learning.
Knowledge management is the process of managing knowledge to meet existing and
future needs. In a simple way, knowledge management is all about ‘know-how’ and ‘know-why’.
Knowledge management also refer to the implementing systems and practices that increase the
sharing of knowledge and information throughout an organization. An effective knowledge
management will build a good relationship between the employees and management as well as
the employees will feel satisfied with their job. However, the Ancol’s management was poor in
knowledge management. They were lacking in availability of relevant skills and knowledge in
doing their responsibilities. According to the case study, many supervisors lacked necessary
interpersonal skills to discuss the matter with subordinates and had no previous experiences with
keeping attendance of employees. Instead, Paul Sims leveraged the knowledge that he learned
through an executive seminar on building trust in workplace and ordered to remove all time
clocks from plant in order to establish new level of credibility and strengthen the relations
between management and employees. But, it is clearly showed that the removal of all time clock
not only failed to strengthen the employee-management relation, but also underpinned many of
problem that have since occurred included productivity dropped due to absenteeism levels
increased, payroll department could not deduct pay for the amount of time that employees were
late, the administrative workloads increased and the supervisors had to take additional
responsibilities to keep track of attendance.
The case study also show that the management of Ancol Corp poor in organizational
learning. Organizational learning, according to Argyris (1960) as the process of detection and
correction of errors. In many respects, organizational learning is similar to individual learning.
The idea is that organizations learn when the knowledge that their members have is explicitly
known and codified by the organization. Organization should seek to make as much of what their
members do as explicit as possible. If members leave, the explicit knowledge that they developed
in their jobs should stay. However, the management of Ancol failed to document and codify the
detailed of the task that had been conducted by the previous plant manager and affected Paul
Sims carried out a similar things in order to solve the employees-management problem. Paul
Sims only knew that the previous manager had conducted the similar thing which was the
removal of all time clocks with similar result from Jackson, a plant manager in Potland after a
couple months that the time clocks be put back in place. At the same time, Paul Sims also made
his knowledge as a barrier to learn. This is because Paul Sim did not do the research on what had
been done by the previous plant manager as well as discuss with the management before he
decided to make a decision. He ordered to remove all time clocks from plant with his belief that
this approach would strengthen the relationship between employees and management. Thus, with
his action the payroll department could not deduct pay for the employees showed up late and
forced to send the warning letter to them. Hence, the relations between employees-management
deteriorated. Apart from this, the management also seem poor in organizational learning as they
failed to control the level of absenteeism and the productivity of the plant reduced dramatically.
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The main problem of Ancol Corp’s management was lack of knowledge management and
poor in organizational learning. In order to improve knowledge management and organizational
learning, an effective knowledge management system played an important role. Knowledge
management system is referred to any kind of IT system that stores and retrieves knowledge,
improves collaboration, locates knowledge sources, mines repositories for hidden knowledge,
captures and uses knowledge.

Intranet is one example of an effective knowledge management system. The intranet is a
private network within a company. It comprise many interlinked local area networks and can be
connected to the internet through one or more gateway computers. Leased lines are used to link a
wide area network. The function of intranet is used to share company information and computing
resources among employees. The intranet also used to facilitate working in groups and for
teleconferences. An intranet can be regarded as a sort of private version of the Internet.
Companies that allow users within their intranet to access the Internet and the security as well as
privacy of their intranets usually will be protected by installing firewall servers. The management
and employees can screen messages in both directions.
A knowledge management system will only be workable to enhance knowledge
management in Ancol’s when the employees in company participate in it. Thus, there are several
steps can be carried out in the implementation of Intranet. First, the user interface has to be
intuitive and easily to use. This can save time for an employee to get and update the information
in a shortest time. Second, the content with truthful information of the intranet has to be updated
daily, therefore, attract the employees to access it. Besides that, the concept of decentralization
must be implemented in the world of intranet so that the employees would not feel pressure and
they can upload any information as long as it is logical to make the content in intranet more
interesting. At the same time, the department’s social network can be created which allow the
employees have the interaction between each other from every department as well as from
different plants. Some contests such a monthly information searching contests with attractive
awards can be conducted to attract the participation of employees in intranet.
With adoption of intranet in Ancol’s management, it can help in encouraging the creation
of knowledge from explicit to explicit or combination process. In this process, the separated
pieces of explicit knowledge can be combines into a whole. Explicit knowledge is referred to the
academic knowledge that can be described in formal language and readily be communicated as
well as shared through print or electronic media methods or any other formal means. Intranet
allow the supervisors and employees of Ancol to codify and store multiple sources of knowledge
and access them with a higher quality, reliable and fast information retrieval system. Therefore,
the information can be updated and standardized anytime and anywhere. The employees can
document and save their detailed description of each task that be performed and reviewed the
detailed information of previous task that been done anytime and anywhere. This can help to Paul
Sims, as a new plant manager to make a research more easily and the similar error can be
avoided.
Besides that, with adoption of intranet, it also can help in managing the tacit knowledge.
Tacit knowledge the knowledge that actually used when doing things but cannot be necessarily
articulated it. Intranet is a judgement-free environment, therefore, it empower employees
especially subordinates to bounce their idea off each other. Thus, Intranet allow employees and
supervisors of Ancol Corp to share their knowledge based on their experienced by telling the
stories through the chatting box without judgement from the supervisors. Hence, the interaction
between the supervisors and the subordinates can occur anytime even after the working hours.
This not only can build trust between employees and management, the interpersonal skills of the
supervisor also can be improved. Therefore, the relations between employees and management
can be improved.
At the same time, the organizational learning can be improve through learning though
exploration. The knowledge exploration involves serendipity, accident, randomness, chance, not
knowing what one will find. The management of Ancol in Lexington plant may explore a new
knowledge organization practices and use it without changing the organizational culture. For
example, the electronic panopticism like CCTV can be set up to foresee the employees, so that

the supervisors can keep track with the attendance of the employees and the payroll department
can make the deduction in the salary or wages of the employees who show up late. Therefore,
the salary and wages can be issued more fairly. The performance of the employees also can be
controlled and therefore, the productivity can be maintained in an expectation level.
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