Henkel Colombia uses the Change Americas Challenge route as a corporate strategy to increase customer loyalty. [CASE STUDY]

One of the largest and most recognized manufacturing companies: Henkel, a company of German origin that operates worldwide with innovations, brands and leading technologies in three business areas: adhesive technologies, cosmetics, detergents and home care, faces a new challenge in Colombia…

With more than 50 years in the Colombian market, Henkel makes presence through Artibel Laboratories and with its corporate purpose of “creating sustainable value”, they have positioned themselves in an almost organic/innate way in the industry, in addition to establishing innovation as one of their main objectives to continue leading.

However, in 2019, they had to face a great challenge: stop thinking of innovation as a shiny feature and transform it to appropriate and leverage it from the local reality.

The lack of agile methods and tools to generate creative initiatives and the lack of divergent options: the great challenge faced by Henkel Colombia.

The absence of practical spaces to encourage creative solutions, the identification of opportunities without tools to take advantage of them and the problems that were solved late without integrating multiple alternatives, made Henkel’s Human Resources Management require the experience and knowledge of Change Americas to boost this capacity in local actions.

Find out more here: How to implement an innovation roadmap in my company with Change Americas?

Knowledge transfer as a transforming agent

To strengthen the culture of creativity and innovation, Henkel Colombia needed to strengthen the capacity of its employees, experiencing innovation in each action proposed and understanding that this attribute is not a faculty that should be restricted to a specific area, but should be part of the corporate core to boost the organization.

Change Americas, as an ally in the resolution of these pain points, designed a Challenge route that took into account the strategy of the parent company, the understanding of the local environment, product portfolio and especially the obstacles that stood in the way of Henkel Colombia’s exponential growth.

In the resolution, an adapted and personalized methodological transfer was proposed together with the relevant tools to understand the customer, their needs and requirements, as well as thinking about practical methods to promote creativity and fully live innovation.

The deployment point of the strategy proposed by Change Americas, showed that, by constantly reviewing the effectiveness of the solutions generated, the feedback and adjustment of actions on the fly, but mainly the rapid iteration of actions based on the response of the client/user is the way to innovate agilely.

“For Henkel Colombia, this way of learning, putting into practice, providing feedback, adjusting and continuing, allowed the internal integration of employees from different areas and teams towards the formulation of innovative initiatives on a day-to-day basis”.

By implementing knowledge transfer, the organization enabled a platform for innovation to achieve benefits such as: efficient response times to market opportunities, improved product profitability and cost-efficiency in processes by quickly solving problems or deviations in its products, and, as an almost innate response, growth in customer/user satisfaction in all categories.

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