Nestle, Pella and Volkswagen

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Volkswagen needed to fundamentally change its core processes and make its employees more productive to stay ahead of the competition. Volkswagen and its competitors needed to maximize the efficiency of every stage of their assembly process in order to reduce their costs and to speed delivery of new vehicles to customers. Their processes however were becoming more and more complex which created their efficiency to be challenged. Volkswagen knew that they had to use information to trigger action against their current processes. Knowledgeable employees were valued in the car industry and they focused their energies on high value activities and driving new efficiencies. Volkswagen is a true global company with processes and systems that are highly localized and departmentalized; each location runs a different set of processes, applications and user interfaces, operating in different languages and time zones.

Nestle, Pella and Volkswagen all implemented knowledge management within their companies but all in different ways. Each company has a unique way of doing business and all having different customer values. It seems that out of the three companies Nestles knowledge management system was the least thought out and had the most difficulties, especially with the changing of their corporate cultures. They seemed to have taken on a project that they were ill prepared to present to the employees and their attitude towards the project did not take into account the overall culture that was already formed. It would be a big uphill challenge to introduce a new system. They forged ahead with the implementation of a new SAP system and ran into many troubles along the way, especially employees not receiving new knowledge on how to use the new system or the processes involved. Nobody wanted to learn the new way of doing things. In the end Nestle was able to pull everything together with SAP in place, common databases and business processes that lead to better forecasting.

For Volkswagen, they had to tweak what they already had in place. They had problems with their supplier faced processing and their employees needed to be more productive to stay ahead of the compeitition. This would require their business becoming more on demand and integrating information and processes to speed decision making. Their knowledge management system was to help employees access and act on information that they required. Volkswagen just had too much information available to employees and they needed to reel this in so that the employees did not get bogged down in unnecessary information. They began working with another company IBM to help put in place a new system designed to simplify and automate the process by which employees and suppliers capture, access, analyze and use information. By implementing a knowledge management system employees and suppliers now spend less time finding information and more time acting on it.

Pella also realized that what they had in place needed to be reconstructed and remodelled to fit there ever growing business. They realized that the way the delivered information had become an increasingly important aspect of how the company engages with its customers. They teamed up with an Oracle program to help improve the digital experience for its customers. Pella’s knowledge management system was implemented and the processes of the company were examined and changed to help deliver a consistent automated digital experience which was their best customer service feature. The pulling together of information about customer interactions enabled Pella’s marketing team to monitor the success of their campaigns and the impact on customer interaction.

I do believe that each company devised their own knowledge management system to the best of their abilities. Knowledge management is a great way to get a company to come together and all employees and management to work together in achieving a uniform oneness. As we have seen from the three cases knowledge management must be handled so that it does not overwhelm employees but is used to grow the knowledge base within the company so that the company can be more profitable, have better processes and engage everyone.