TurningknowledgeintoactionatHeinekenUSA.docVIP

Turning knowledge into action at Heineken USA 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 whic