**5. Results**

**4.2. Employees, actual knowledge and knowledge gap**

potential candidates for employees.

228 Knowledge Management Strategies and Applications

**Table 1.** Matching required and actual knowledge.

Employees represent the basis for gathering current knowledge. There are many approaches to prove that an employee possesses specific knowledge and what the quality of it is (strength, level). In our approach, the 360° feedback method [28] was used. We used a list of all key required knowledge and assessed all employees (Likert scale from 0 to 5; 0 means knowledge not available). We gave employees the opportunity to extend this explicit knowledge with their tacit knowledge. In the context of our model, the term 'tacit' means the knowledge of an employee that is currently unknown to the company. Knowing about tacit knowledge is essential information when new processes have requirements for new types of knowledge. In practice, for optimization, it is also recommended that we have the knowledge data about

The last step of input data preparation is a calculation of the key knowledge gap: each

Any deviation of actual knowledge over and below the required knowledge is considered to

**Table 1** shows a numerical example of matching the actual knowledge from *k*1 to *k*10 of employee *E*1 on activities from *a*1 to *a*7 of work position *W*1 (e.g. Product Manager of ETO project). The example is based on the real data of ETO company, Iskratel. Negative values (grey cells) represent deficits of employee knowledge strength compared to the required knowledge of a work position. The top rows represent activities of the work position with a

, explained in Eq. (2).

employee is compared to all work positions. We used the criterion *c*ij

be inappropriate and will lower process efficiency (**Table 1**).

We demonstrated the capabilities of our model on a small section of the real process that was described in **Figure 3**. This numerical example is based on the data of company Iskratel. We performed simulations of this example with the same tools as the calculations of real cases (**Tables 2** and **3**). Definitions of processes were recorded in the repository of Aris Toolset soft‐ ware [29]. Definitions of actual and required knowledge were recorded with MS Share Point and MS SQL. All data were then exported to the MS Excel analytical tool and solved with the WhatsBest [30] add‐on. MS Excel was also used as reporting tool.
