http://www.inbev.com

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About

Inbev UK & Ireland employs 4,000 people and operates breweries in each of the four home nations. Its extensive brand portfolio includes Stella Artois, Tennent’s Lager, Boddingtons, Hoegaarden, Bass Draught Ale, Castlemaine XXXX and Murphy’s. InBev UK embarked on a mission to unlock the true business value of company information by sharing it via a new intranet iknow – with a view to making it the primary information resource throughout the company.

Challenge

Like most companies, Inbev UK faced spiralling costs as it produced, updated, stored and shared endless lists of manuals, policies, directories and sales aids as part and parcel of its everyday business. With iknow it sought to make the intranet the definitive source of information for its employees – ensuring that every time a manual or a procedure is updated, it would be reflected immediately on the Intranet for everyone to see straight away. A four-strong specialist team within Human Resources was charged with ensuring that iknow’s content – which was designed to provide easy access to information on every area of Inbev UK’s businesses and brands - was up-to-date. iknow comprises a staggering 26,000 pages, and updating and linking new content caused the team a major headache. Inbev UK needed to enable the people who really understood iknow to manage its content and easily upload valuable information. Handing the content management tasks over to these non-technical users would free up the time of the core IT team and ensure the site remained up-to-date with the latest information.

Solution

Led by corporate communications specialists CDS, Interbrew UK implemented RedDot’s content management solution RedDot CMS Professional, which provides the iknow team with the tools to easily manage every aspect of iknow. The iknow team draws on RedDot’s easy-to-use SmartEdit technology and intelligent keyword-based linking functionality to add new content and ensure each item is easily accessible across the intranet – literally halving the time needed to maintain it. In the future RedDot’s technology is expected to support extensions of the service to teleworkers. InBev UK has unlocked major benefits from adopting RedDot’s technology to drive its intranet, iknow. Now the company’s most important source of business information for its 4,000 UK employees, iknow receives over 14,000 visits a week with an average of over 64,000 page impressions (making it more widely read than the brewing giant’s in-house magazine). In a company known for big names, iknow has become a brand in its own right – a name that’s regularly on the lips of its employees. In the two years since its launch, iknow has paid back its cost, even if you take into account just visible savings – such as the money no longer being spent on printing manuals and policies. But beyond that are the myriad – and often unquantifiable savings in time and money, plus increases in efficiency and good business practices.