BP’s Competitive Advantage

Though the product they are probably just about famous for in the minds of consumers, gasoline, is thought of as homogeneous, the success of BP in the companies dexterity to grow and maintain its standing as a multinational naught superpower lies in its management of human capital. BPs true belligerent advantage is not in the commodities or services it sells, their success stems from the companies ability to manage a less easily duplicated resource association.Collaboration and noesis management form the core of the BP value system. As expressed by BP in their own words, they aim to engage the creative talents of our employees, and develop and concur asterisking, address-effective technology and intellectual creativity to enhance innovation and bran-new ideas (BP, n. d. ). This paper entrust address this unique aspect of the BP logical argument model, knowledge management, and how it translates into financial performance. BackgroundBP is a global energy leader, the core components of their air are oil and gas exploration and production, refining and marketing of oil colour supply products, manufacturing and marketing of chemicals, and the manufacture of Photovoltaic (solar) cells. They are currently in the top three internation eachy in gas reserves, and are the largest retailer of gas in the US, as well as one of the populaces largest marketers of aviation fuel (Corporate Watch, n. d. ).Founded by William Knox DArcy from a momentous oil find in Iran, they have expanded through step-up and merger, currently operating in over 100 countries, employing 97,600 people with 2007 revenues especial(a) $284 billion (BP, n. d. ). knowledge Management The challenge to an organization the size and scene of BP can often be capturing the wealth of knowledge created by their people, booked in business, learning best practices, and sharing and storing that information between business units to maximize BPs potential.BPs methodology is encompassed by a im partial framework, which describes a learning cycle before, during and after any event which is back up by simple process tools (Kotelnikov, n. d. , 1). The BP learning method is to treat every process as a closed learning loop lessons learned from each experience are agreed upon and posted on the smart set intranet to capture knowledge and experience to be shared by all BP business units. Companies create vast amounts of valuable knowledge through practice of their employees, without a system in place to capture this knowledge it will often leave with their employees.Further, in a large company the likes of BP, the potential exists for it to operate not as a collaborative unit, alone as a collection of one-on-one fiefdoms in the form of individual business units (Quelch & Deshpande, 2004, p. 96). To foster this sense of collaborative behavior, BP created peer review and overlay business unit interaction strategies (Quelch & Deshpande). An example of how this has positively impacted the companies profitability, of late due to knowledge sharing between business units of engineers, they achieved a cost savings of $74 million in 1998 to meet their collective address of reducing retail site construction by 10% (SAIC, n. . ).As management of information systems flourished in the decade of the 1990s, the success of BPs matched advantage in their commitment to managing knowledge will invariably lead to other organizations creating practices and infrastructure to support knowledge management in the future. Knowledge management creates competitive advantage by storing and sharing collective on the job learned experiences and distributing them to present and future generations of an organization that would otherwise be lost. BP has maintained their ability to grow and improve profitability through execution of instrument of knowledge management strategy.