KM Case Toyota Dimensi
KM Case Toyota Dimensi
Context-sensitive
help screen for the main frontline application (DRIVES)
Policy page,
providing succinct but complete information on stamp duty rates
Simple, but
effective, feedback page for use by frontline staff
Highly-simplified
search results page
Portion of the
‘back-of-the-book’ index provided as part of Frontline Help
source:
http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/rta/index.html
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KM Case : Frito-Lay
It takes more than good flavor and a heartY crunch to sell the salty snacks churned out at Frito-
Lay. Corporate executives knew that capturing best practices and corporate information would
give employees something they could sink their teeth into. But information was scattered around
the company in disparate systems, and there was no easy way for the geographically dispersed
sales force to get at it.
“We had knowledge trapped in files everywhere,” says Mike Marino, vice president of customer
development at Frito-Lay, an $8.5 billion division of PepsiCo in Plano, Texas. Marino says that
he knew if the 15-member sales team could only access the same information, it would solve its
ongoing problems with information sharing and communication.
For example, multiple salespeople would ask the corporate sales, marketing and operations staff
for the same types of information and data, such as current private-label trends in their snack
category or research on people’s shopping behavior, he says. The result? Frito-Lay’s support
staff ended up performing the same tasks over and over. If that information lived in a central,
easily accessible spot, the salespeople could access it as needed.
Additionally, Marino says, much valuable knowledge was squirreled away on each salesperson’s
system. There were many idiosyncratic methods of capturing information, “none of which were
terribly efficient,” he says.
Marino says the sales team also lacked a place for brainstorming and collaboration online. “If
somebody got a piece of research and wanted to get input from account executives in Baltimore
and Los Angeles, the ability to collaborate [online] just wasn’t there,” he says.
The answer, Marino’s group realized, was to build a knowledge management portal on the
corporate intranet. A KM portal is a single point of access to multiple sources of
information and provides personalized access. Companies are starting to pay attention to
portals because they offer an efficient way to capture information, says Carl Frappaolo,
executive vice president and cofounder of the Delphi Group, a consultancy in Boston. A
KM portal at Frito-Lay would give the sales department a central location for all sales-
related customer and corporate information and cut down on the time it took to find and
share research. In addition to different types of information about the team’s customers–
including sales, analysis and the latest news–the portal would contain profiles on who’s
who in the corporation, making finding an internal expert a snap.
Built From Scratch
Marino chose this sales team as the portal pilot because it was working with a Frito-Lay client
that Marino says is an industry leader in marketing, product promotions and merchandising. The
sales team was dispersed across the country, making it ideal for determining whether the portal
would succeed in bridging geographic boundaries when it came to sharing internal information.
Based on input from the pilot team, Marino’s group established three goals for the Frito-Lay
portal: to streamline knowledge, exploit customer-specific data and foster team collaboration. He
brought in Navigator Systems, a consultancy based in Dallas, which has worked with Frito-Lay
in the past and had some experience building knowledge management portals. Navigator built a
prototype in about three months using technologies previously approved by Frito-Lay’s IS
department, including Lotus Domino, BusinessObjects’ WebIntelligence, Java and IBM’s DB2
database. Since there was no advanced search engine in use at the company, Navigator’s
consultants recommended a tool called Autonomy, a natural language search engine that allows
users to search information in different repositories such as intranet sites, PowerPoint
presentations and spreadsheets, says Todd Price, the principal consultant at Navigator who
worked on the implementation. “The search engine enabled the person to get to all the disparate
data sets through one view,” explains Marino.
Marino and Price essentially had to start from scratch when it came to populating the portal.
“Never before at Frito-Lay had they tried to capture expertise systematically in one place,” notes
Price. Marino and Price did an audit within the company and then created expertise profiles on
the portal so that sales staff in the field would have an easy way to learn who’s who at
headquarters in Plano. That way, people who have expertise in areas such as promotion planning,
activity planning, costing or new product announcements can be readily tracked down and
contacted for information. “In a large organization, that’s critical, because there’s a wealth of
knowledge. But for someone new in the field it takes a lot of tries to figure out who they are,”
Price says.
Security was also a big concern because the pilot team would be working with confidential client
information. The particular customer supported by the pilot team “had custom information about
sales performance that they shared with members of the Frito-Lay team, but we were contracted
not to let that information get outside the team that worked with that customer,” says Marino. His
group built the portal so that different sections of it were password-protected, ensuring that only
the pertinent users could get to the confidential information.
The portal went live in January 2000. Since then, three additional sales teams, or customer
communities as they are called internally, have been given access to the portal with different
content–including research abstracts and what Marino calls performance scorecards, which
evaluate account performance. “If somebody in sales or market research did a study in a
particular area like private-label trends, [the user] would be able to click to that abstract and get a
summary of that study.” Users access the portal, known as the Customer Community Portal
(CCP), through a Netscape Navigator browser and enter their name and password on the Frito-
Lay intranet.
Results
The CCP has paid off with increased sales. “What we expected to see was that the pilot team
would outperform others in terms of sales and profitability,” Marino says. While he declined to
give figures, he says the test team doubled the growth rate of the customer’s business in the salty
snack category. “The retailer is happy because they’re doing more business in their market, and
we’re doing business at a faster growth rate with this customer than with other customers,”
Marino says.
It also made the sales team happier. For example, the pilot team members reside in 10 different
cities, so “the tool has become extremely valuable for communication” and helps cut down on
travel, says Joe Ackerman, a customer team leader in the sales division based in Portland, Ore. A
year after implementing the portal, the pilot group has been able to share documents concurrently
instead of having to send faxes around the country to different offices. “We have to manipulate
large amounts of data, and now we can look at it online versus having to have somebody
physically travel to the retail customer. It’s almost a distance learning tool as much as anything
else,” he says.
The CCP has also helped foster a sense of camaraderie and relationship building. For example,
the portal homepage lists the team members’ birthdays. People can also share best practices–on
anything under the sun. If someone developed an effective sales presentation for a potential
customer in Boston, a salesperson in San Francisco could co-opt the information. Salespeople
can also find the latest news about their customers, and there’s an automatic messaging feature
that informs team members who is online.
For Ackerman, the portal has also been an invaluable tool for helping him assess employee skill
sets, because each salesperson is required to catalog his or her strengths and areas of expertise.
“As a team leader, it helps me analyze where people’s gaps might be without having to travel to
another member’s location,” he says.
The portal has also helped boost employee retention rates, says Ackerman. Turnover used to be
terrible, he says, because salespeople felt pressured to find vital information and communicate
with the rest of the team. Marino adds that salespeople felt frustrated and disconnected because
there was no way to efficiently collaborate with the rest of their group unless they flew into a
central location.
Since the portal has been in place, not one person on the 15-member team has left. Part of that
can directly be attributed to the portal, says Ackerman, “because it helps build the connection.”
In company surveys, salespeople previously complained about geographic constraints and how
they didn’t feel connected and part of a team, he says.
The portal has proven so successful that its use has now become a PepsiCo initiative, says
Marino. That means it will soon have added functionality so that employees across all three
divisions–including Tropicana–can take advantage of product performance information on a
jointly shared customer like a supermarket, he says. Marino says the different PepsiCo divisions
will have the ability to copromote and comerchandise multiple products that are consumed
together–such as carbonated beverages and salty snacks–to drive greater sales internally,
naturally and for its customer. That’s talking more than just peanuts.
source:
http://www.cio.com/archive/050101/crunch.html
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KM Case – Marconi
When Marconi went on a shopping spree and acquired 10 telecommunications companies over a
three-year period, it faced a serious challenge: How could the $3 billion manufacturer of
telecommunications equipment ensure that its technical support agents knew enough about
newly acquired technology to provide quick and accurate answers to customers on the phone?
And how could Marconi bring new agents up to speed on all the company’s products?
Marconi’s technical support agents?500 engineers scattered in 14 call centers around the globe?
field approximately 10,000 questions every month about the company’s products. Before the
acquisitions, agents had relied on Tactics Online, an extranet where they and customers could
search for frequently asked questions and text documents. As new agents and products joined the
company’s ranks, Marconi wanted to supplement the website with a more comprehensive
knowledge management system. As engineers from the newly acquired companies came on
board, however, they were hesitant to share their knowledge about the products they had been
supporting. “They felt that their knowledge was a security blanket that helped guarantee their
jobs,” says Dave Breit, director of technology and R&D for managed services in Warrendale, Pa.
“With all of the acquisitions, it was essential that we all avoid hoarding knowledge and share it
instead.”
At the same time, Marconi wanted to streamline its customer service organization by making
more of its product and systems information available directly to customers and shortening the
length of customer calls. “We wanted to leverage the Web for customer self-service versus
increasing the number of agents,” Breit says. “We also wanted to provide our frontline engineers
[who interact directly with customers] with more information more quickly so that they could
resolve more calls faster.”
Building on a KM Foundation
When Marconi began evaluating knowledge management technologies in the spring of 1998, the
concept of sharing knowledge among agents was nothing new. Agents were already accustomed
to working in teams of three or four people, gathering in war room fashion to solve customers’
technical issues. And a year earlier, Marconi had started basing a percentage of agents’ quarterly
bonuses on the amount of knowledge they submitted to Tactics Online as well as their
involvement with mentoring and training other agents. “Each agent was expected to teach two
training classes and write 10 FAQs to earn their full bonus,” says Breit. “When we brought new
companies online, the new agents received the same bonus plan. This approach allowed us to
build a very open knowledge-sharing environment.”
To augment Tactics Online, Marconi chose software from ServiceWare Technologies, in part
because its technology would integrate easily with the company’s Remedy CRM system, which
agents use to log incoming calls from customers and track other customer interactions. In
addition, says Breit, Marconi wanted its agents to populate its existing Oracle database of
product information.
Breit’s division spent six months implementing the new system and training agents. The system?
dubbed KnowledgeBase?is linked to the company’s CRM system and is powered by the Oracle
database. The integrated view of Marconi’s customers and products provides agents with a
comprehensive history of interactions. Technical support agents can, for example, put markers in
the database and immediately pick up at the point where the customer last spoke with another
agent.
On the Front Line
Tactics Online complements the new system. “The data stored in KnowledgeBase are specific
troubleshooting tips and hints on our various product lines,” says Zehra Demiral, manager of
knowledge management systems. “Tactics Online, on the other hand, is more of a doorway for
customers to come into our customer support organization. From there, customers can access
KnowledgeBase or their service requests or our online training manuals.”
Technical support agents now rely on KnowledgeBase for the latest solutions to customers’
product and systems problems. Level 1 agents answer all incoming calls, solve customers’
problems when possible, record the calls in the company’s CRM system and transfer the more
difficult calls up the line to Level 2 agents. Level 2 agents, meanwhile, are the heart of the
organization, composing about 70 percent of the technical support organization. They handle the
more difficult calls and troubleshoot and diagnose equipment and network problems. “They’re
the majority of our knowledge users and contributors,” says Breit. “They write up a synopsis of
the call and feed it into KnowledgeBase [on an ongoing basis] so that other agents can refer to
the solution later.”
After Level 2 agents submit their knowledge “raw” to a holding queue, Level 3 agents confirm
the accuracy of the information, make any necessary changes and then submit the document to
Demiral. (Level 3 agents also act as consultants, helping Level 2 agents solve problems and
serving as intermediaries between the agents and the company’s engineering departments.) The
entire process of updating the KnowledgeBase system with a new solution typically takes
between three days and two weeks.
Changing Roles
As Breit anticipated, implementing KnowledgeBase has changed the agents’ roles. Level 1
agents, for example, now do more in-depth troubleshooting because they have more information
available at their fingertips. In fact, they solve twice as many calls themselves (50 percent
instead of 25 percent) in a shorter time (10 minutes versus 30 minutes). Since Level 1 agents can
handle more calls, this group has doubled in size during the past two years.
The transition wasn’t quite as painless, however, for the Level 2 and Level 3 agents. Indeed, their
roles changed significantly. “Rather than simply submitting HTML pages to Tactics Online, they
were now asked to analyze the problems in a very procedural way and create diagnostic ’trees,’”
says Breit. “That’s a more analytical way to think through a problem. Most of these guys had
thought in terms of ’what is the fastest way to solve a problem’ rather than ’what is the most
efficient way to solve a problem.’”
With hundreds of people submitting solutions, Marconi tended to get a lot of wheel reinvention.
“There can be five or six ways to solve the [same] problem, but there’s one way that’s most
efficient,” Breit says. To unearth and disseminate the most efficient solutions, agents were
required to flowchart each of their solutions for the first three months following
KnowledgeBase’s launch. “It’s amazing how many [agents] were unconscious of their own
methodologies,” says Breit. “It was somewhat painful, but they eventually felt they benefited
because they understood how they solve problems.”
As a result, agents now create technical solutions for customers in the most efficient?and logical?
way possible instead of simply offering a “quick and dirty” solution. Think of the difference
between simply being told what keys to strike on your PC and being taught how your software
works and the logic behind executing a certain sequence of keystrokes. Once you actually
understand how the product works, you can use the software more effectively and resolve more
problems yourself.
Agents also had to change the way they present the solutions to customers. “We wanted to
provide a collaboration tool for employees and a library source for our customers,” says Demiral.
“Engineers wanted to provide a lot of detailed information yet we needed a degree of simplicity
for customers. Most of the time, the immediate focus is on what a great collaboration tool this is
and how it overcomes geographical distance among agents. Then I have to remind [agents] that
this is a tool that we want customers to use and that they’ll have to organize, write and present
the content with customers in mind.”
Making It Work
Demiral spent a lot of time working with the Level 3 agents to make their solutions less complex
and streamline the review process. “We had to go through two iterations of how to organize and
present the content,” Demiral says. “Customers tend to think in terms of the product and then the
problem. But engineers often think about the problem first and then the product.”
The result: Customers often wouldn’t fully understand the solution. At the same time, Marconi
had to work at easing Level 3 agents’ concerns that making them responsible for reviewing
solution content would suddenly turn them into technical writers.
Marconi confronted cultural issues as well. “Business needs are different in different parts of the
world,” says Demiral. “What may be normal business practice for Americans may not be
common elsewhere.” In Europe, for example, the value of the KnowledgeBase system was not
readily accepted. But once employees there saw that customers could use the system to solve
some of their own problems, they got on board. Such an experience has been incorporated into
how Marconi approaches KM. “We sometimes have to introduce the idea of knowledge
management over time, validate it, and then move forward,” Demiral says.
To ensure that agents continue contributing new knowledge to KnowledgeBase, Marconi uses
rewards. Besides bonuses, knowledge contributors receive recognition during meetings and in a
newsletter. “Rewards help feed this culture,” Breit says. “Peer pressure also plays a role.
Everyone wants to contribute because it’s the right thing to do. You also have to make sure that
the system works well and that employees use it long enough to see it work. It has to be
embedded in training and fully integrated into daily operations so that it just becomes part of
how you do business.”
source:
http://www.cio.com/archive/110101/knowitall.html
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