SEMINARUL 5

STUDIU DE CAZ - HEINEKEN

TURNING KNOWLEDGE INTO ACTION AT

HEINEKEN USA
A. Prezentarea cazului

Heineken’s four-phased approach to its KM implementation

By Charles Chase, Heineken USA

Knowledge grows when it’s embbedded in corporate culture through human

experience and business frameworks. And leveraging it requires not only
understanding the corporate culture and organizational structure, but also better
understanding the marketplace, suppliers, customers, and most of all,
competitors. We have based our KM program on these principles and are
working to apply a set of approaches to organize knowledge, turn that
knowledge into action and put that knowledge in the hands of key decision-
makers who are closest to our customers. This framework helps us achieve
corporate goals, meet performance targets and implement business-wide
strategies in support of those objectives. Intellectual capital is only valuable if
it’s turned into action. Our key learnings at Heineken USA are that:
 technology only facilitates information flow;
 information isn’t always data-centric;
 information isn’t necessarily knowledge;
 knowledge is only valuable when it’s actionable.

So how did we make sure those learnings were incorporated into our KM
implementation plan?

Reorganizing for competitiveness

During the past two years, Heineken USA has been redesigning its
organizational structure to become more competitive in the US beer industry.
We’re not re-engineering our organization, but rather expanding it to put more
capabilities and empowerment at the local level to ensure our products are the
freshest and most relevant to our customers and consumers. As America’s largest
beer importer with the heritage of producing high-quality products, we feel it’s
our responsibility to continue to strive to be the leader in all aspects of our
business. Because of this succes, the company has been expanding the
organization and adding the talent needed to continue growing our brands.
 One of our major innovations has been the addition of the KM
organization which we succesfully launched in 2001. The KM team not only
manages our technology requirements, but also integrates consumer research,
content management and business analysis and insights into a holistic approach
that turns knowledge into action. The overall principles of our new
organizational initiative are to build on our succes by taking steps that will bring
us closer to fulfilling our vision to be the preferred brand, preferred supplier and
preferred employer.
Our KM mission simply states that we’ll combine the resources of
technology, research and analysis to provide Heineken USA employees with the
right tools to make decisions closer to the customer. We define KM as a three-
step process:
1. create, collect, manage/maintain and disseminate information;
2. turn that information into actionable knowledge;
3. transfer that knowledge to key decision makers,resulting in the sale of
more beer.

Translating information into knowledge is conceptually an easy step, but in

practice quite difficult. It has required a sophisticated network infrastructure to
support acces to data and information, while enabling employees to extract the
kind of information that allows employees, customers and consumers to take
action that lead to predictable outcomes. As a result, we have formulated a
strategy around our knowledge architecture. This is much more than a technical
solution: it involves three main components of people content and technology.

Blending people, content and technology

Managing knowledge means blending each of these components into a cohesive
unit that understands the key people who are the suppliers and users of the
content, the necessary content and the technologies appropiate to meet KM
objectives. As a result, we have identified five key roles and responsabilities for
the KM group.
1. facilitate the creation, collection, integration and dissemination of
information via enchanced data collection, quality, flow and accesibility;
2. provide entreprise-wide, decision-support tools that allow non-technical
people to acces, report and analyze information stored in remote data
warehouses, datamarts and business knowledge;
3. actively source and manage content available to the company through
various information channels and tools;
4. provide consumer insights to marketing, sales and senior management
through internal research vehicles, syndicated data and analysis;
5. drive the creation of knowledge by combining fact-based analysis with
the dissemination of consumer, customer and employee information and
experiences.
Building a succesfull knowledge architecture has involved crafting an
infrastructure to support our knowledge-enabling applications. We’we added
information that’s pertinent to the company’s needs, build content capabilities to
assess employee content needs and added more internal analytical capabilities
that enable knowledge creation. The strategy we decided to implement took
advantage of web-enabled technology and enterprise data warehousing to
simplify and integrate our internal and external information structures. We
updated our data requirements on an as-needed basis to keep costs down, and
ramped up our supporting technology in preparation for our first key deliverable
– corporate and commercial Web sites that link all our datamarts, systems
applications and information. By doing this, we’we enabled employees,
customers and consumers to access information through one integrated portal
view. The long-term results will be measured in reduced maintenance, faster
delivery of information, reduced duplication and more actionable knowledge.

The details of implementation

Making our vision a reality will require four phases over a five-year period
starting with the implementation of a new technology infrastructure. See Figure
1, below, for a graphic depiction of the stages and phases. Phase I of our vision
built the knowledge architecture and included:
 acquiring senior management buy-in of the new KM organizational
structure;
 aquiring approval, purchases and implementation of the technology
infrastructure;
 activating our business to employee and support our category-
management initiatives at the retail level to capture account specific
information, as well as distributor depletions through our new technology
infrastructure.
 Figure 1: Stages and phases of KM development
Five stages

Awarness Start Consolidate Embed Support

Expert efort

Here’s where we are today

KMWeVisionaim toPhase
provide
I in-depth
Phase II knowledge inIII such areas
Phase PhaseasIV price sensitivity,
advertising Year
Time effectiveness,
1 promotion
Years 2-3 effectiveness
Years 4 and merchandising
Years 5 execution.
In addition, we want to mine and analyze our panel data to better & beyound
understand our
consumers attributes through advanced analytics. This will help the brand teams
design more targeted advertising campaigns and brand positioning. Finaly, we’ll
provide economic and market analytical support to the senior management team
by helping them better understand the dynamics of the economy and their effects
on the Heineken brand portofolio. We’ll help answer such question as, “Does the
increase in gasoline prices impact the consumtion of off-premise beer sales in
the Convenience&Gas channel?” and “Do consumer confidence levels play a
role in consumer buying patterns for beer – Do they buy down during bad times,
and buy up during good times?”.
Finaly, Phase IV will more formally align KM with our corporate strategy
and core values to provide fresh content and consumer/brand health awareness,
while continuing to provide business support tools and applications that drive
profitable volume growth. In other words, we’ll embed KM principles into our
business practices by making it a fundamental part of our culture and boiling
down our diverse set of tools and processes into a few key ones that raise the
level of competence in various areas of the company.

Expanding of the foundation

Over the past year, we’we invested heavily in a knowledge architecture to
improve our ability to capture and disseminate knowledge. As a result, we’we
significantly improved our technology infrastructure, which will serve as the
foundation for further expansion of our knowledge architecture.
Through the use of our enterprise data warehouses, Web-based application and a
breadth of new skills, we have developed a strong framework to overcome many
of the information gaps Heineken USA has faced in the past. We are committed
to providing a technological infrastructure that adds relevant consumer, business
information and knowledge to help all internal and external users make more
informed strategic decisions.
Figure 2, above, depicts our evolutionary business framework, \which we
continue to improve as we build our knowledge architecture. The framework is
built on a department-based view of our organization and treats knowledge as a
strategic asset that fosters action. It shows how the various departments work
toghether around the star, which signifies the points of collaboration among
content, information gathering, knowledge generation and ultimately action.

Why we’re doing KM

Heineken USA measures the return on our KM investments in term of:
 improved speed of knowledge transfer – faster, simplified access to vital
information and knowledge that drives action and results;
 improved integration of internal/external information sources, reducing
duplication of information and maintenance costs;
 greater retention of expertise and more effective frontline decision-
making capabilities that facilitate collaboration between employees,
customers and business partners;
 a more efficient market investment strategy by better understanding the
dynamics of consumer behavior and overall business environment;
 increased beer sales and improved profitability.
 Figure 2: Heineken USA’s KM business framework
Business Goals
and Objectives

Content
Identify Content Facilitate
Management
Requests

Business Analysis
Consumer & Insights
Research Knowledge
Creation

Tools Disseminate Educations

Information Information
Knowledge
Technology Technology

Business
Results

KM is changing the way information is collected and knowledge is defined. It’s

also affecting the speed at which knowledge can be delivered to take action
across broad aspects of business. The paradigm is shifting from the ideea that
“knowledge is power, so hoard it” to “knowledge is power, so share it and it will
multiply”. At Heineken USA, we like to think of KM as putting knowledge in a
bottle and passing it arround.

B. Subiecte de analizat:

1. Identificaţi, cu exemplificări, cinci principii şi percepte ale

managementului bazat pe cunoştinţe care se regăsesc în studiul de caz.