May. 1, 2001 Issue of CIO Magazine Frito-Lay's sales force sells more chips through information collaboration. BY ESTHER SHEIN 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, "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." -MIKE MARINO, V.P. OF CUSTOMER DEVELOPMENT, FRITO-LAY 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. Page 1 of 4Built 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