Index Management Design as Knowledge Management Enhancers for the Colombian Swine Industry

Abstract

The Colombian Swine Industry (CSI) has a global importance in agriculture as a sustainable objective worldwide, and it is very attractive for farmers for its short productive cycle, if it is compared to other business lines. Thus, the CSI seeks to encourage profitability, to minimize production cost, to open new markets, and to supply local demand. Therefore, they need to search tools for measuring its key indicators. They have important constrains, for instance the lack of technology, economic benefits, and human resources training. With the above, the article objective is to identify pig producers’ key indicators which could carry to create and share knowledge management. Pig industry key indicators were extracted from the literature. After that, those indicators were contrasted by 19 companies using a Likert scale; then, those were analyzed and grouped according to the Balance Scorecard perspectives using the main component analysis. Finally, a measuring instrument was designed, it was validated by 15 CSI experts, who then applied it to a representative sample of 62 companies in the agricultural sector. Among the most outstanding results were the list of pig industry key indicators and its validation, its importance and measurement level; CSI sustainable indexes inclusion from literature; knowledge creation in pig farmers using indexes for measuring and making decisions.