SEMINARUL 4 - ORGANIZATIA SI MANAGEMENTUL BAZATE PE

CUNOSTINTE

STUDIU DE CAZ - HEINEKEN

TURNING KNOWLEDGE INTO ACTION AT HEINEKEN USA

A. Prezentarea cazului

Heinekens four-phased approach to its KM implementation

By Charles Chase, Heineken USA

Knowledge grows when its 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 its turned into action. Our key learnings at Heineken USA are that:
technology only facilitates information flow;
information isnt always data-centric;
information isnt necessarily knowledge;
knowledge is only valuable when its 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. Were 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 Americas
largest beer importer with the heritage of producing high-quality products, we feel its 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 well 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;

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 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. Wewe added information thats pertinent to the
companys 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, wewe
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;

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 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

Heres where we are today

KM Vision Phase I Phase II Phase III Phase IV

Time
We aim to provide in-depth knowledge in such areas as price sensitivity, beyound
Year 1 Years 2-3 Years 4 Years 5& advertising
effectiveness, promotion effectiveness and merchandising execution. In addition, we want to
mine and analyze our panel data to better understand our consumers attributes through
advanced analytics. This will help the brand teams design more targeted advertising
campaigns and brand positioning. Finaly, well 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. Well 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, well embed KM principles into our business practices by making it a fundamental

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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, wewe invested heavily in a knowledge architecture to improve our
ability to capture and disseminate knowledge. As a result, wewe 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 were 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 USAs 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 4
Results
 KM is changing the way information is collected and knowledge is defined. Its 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. Identificai, cu exemplificri, cinci principii i percepte ale managementului bazat pe

cunotine care se regsesc n studiul de caz.