Looking at the modern retail chains, the management system is the engine of growth as the retailers depend on it to standardise and codify the products and services as well as cut cost to maintain the satisfactory customer service level. As a result, modern retail chains have been adopting new ICT technologies to improve their management systems over the years [23]. Nevertheless, management system itself has its own limitations, especially in fast changing retail industry. It is not flexible in solving complex problems and not proficient enough in responding to the emergency cases and events in real time. In any case however human factors cannot be disregarded by the retailers.
4. Conclusion
From the above literature review and discussion, it could be concluded that the integrated KM strategy seems to be most appropriate, if it were to be adopted by the modern retail organisations. In this context, it is proposed that the integrated KM strategy is most appropriate for the Malaysian modern retail chains. The approach integrates both the codification and personalisation strategies and uses ICT technologies as a platform to ensure the effectiveness of KM implementation as a well as improve the performance of the retail chains. Further empirical research in a form of survey research for retail chains and multivariate analysis could be used to validate the findings.
Acknowledgements
This research was financially supported by the Razak School Research Grant (Vot No. 4b036) from Razak School of Engineering and Advanced Technology, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia and Ministry of Higher Education.