Brewed Together: How HEINEKEN Captures Expert Knowledge at Scale with 360Learning

The challenge: Breaking silos within a global giant

Before adopting a collaborative learning strategy, HEINEKEN faced several organizational barriers to learning:

1. Inefficient knowledge silos and duplication: With over 85 operating companies (OpCos), knowledge was often shared informally. "People in different operating companies didn't have visibility,”explains Raquel Ferreira, Learning Experience Specialist. “You would often see similar content being produced multiple times. It wasn’t cost-effective."

2. Disengaged local communities and cost inefficiencies: Local teams often felt disconnected from global headquarters. They spent budgets on local programs only to have similar versions launched globally. "This meant local resources were used only to have the plug pulled," says Jodi Josias, Learning Experience Specialist. "It contributed to disengagement."

3. Inconsistent governance: Admins in different OpCos worked in isolation, leading to a lack of standardized roles and "lax governance." Without clear criteria for Admins and Authors, course quality varied wildly, and navigating the platform became difficult for learners moving between functions.

4. Aspiration vs daily practice: While "Learn, Share, Reapply" was an existing core value, the company lacked the workflows and technology to make it operational.

The solution: Building a collaborative learning ecosystem

To solve these challenges, HEINEKEN selected 360Learning for three primary reasons: 

1. Scalability: Global deployment combined with local flexibility.

2. AI capabilities: Rapid translation and content creation.

3. Ease of use: A simple interface for both admins and learners.

Related: How HEINEKEN is Transforming L&D for 85,000+ Employees with Collaborative Learning

Here’s how the team brought collaborative learning to life by focusing on decentralizing L&D and empowering local teams, incorporating AI into their workflows, and establishing core quality standards. 

Decentralizing L&D: Empowering local teams

HEINEKEN empowered local teams to identify and work with their own subject-matter experts (SMEs) to create learning programs.

"360Learning puts us in a position to empower local teams to work with SMEs,” explains Jodi. “They know their people best; they have the ability to identify, certify, and build relationships with their internal experts to capture and share knowledge locally."

To put this into practice, they introduced the Learning Academy and the Collaboration Hub.

A global community of practice for Admins: The Learning Academy

To solve the historical challenges of isolated workflows and lax governance, HEINEKEN launched a  Learning Academy with support from their Learning Consultant as part of 360Learning's train-the-trainer services. This initiative was designed to move beyond traditional training by creating a global community of practice that bridges the gap between Admins in different OpCos.

Previously, Admins worked in silos, leading to inconsistent content quality and disengaged communities. The Learning Academy addressed this by introducing:

• Standardized alignment: Annual certifications for Admins, Authors, and Coaches has established a “shared language” and universal quality standards across 85 OpCos.

• Connected governance: By training Admins together under one global framework, HEINEKEN transformed them from isolated local teams into a unified network that collaborates on platform design and governance.

• Expert empowerment: The certification process ensures that every contributor, regardless of their region, feels empowered to maintain global standards while sharing local expertise.

"The certification helps people feel empowered to do a great job while ensuring content remains fit for purpose," says Raquel. This shift focused the organization on maintaining global excellence rather than merely "creating courses."

When combined with the Collaboration Hub, this connected Admin community can now invite cross-regional Authors to provide nuance and expertise, making every learning path more qualitative and relevant.

The Collaboration Hub: Establishing co-authoring

With guidance from a dedicated 360Learning Learning Consultant—who provided bespoke support and workshops on strategy beyond standard technical training—HEINEKEN created the Collaboration Hub, a space where OpCo's learning teams post Learning Needs that SMEs from other regions can fulfill by localizing existing content.

"Now you can have a local owner in Portugal working on a content project with a local expert in South Africa," says Raquel. This co-authoring capability turns individual expertise into scalable assets.

For example, "when one OpCo creates an AI course, another can quickly adapt it for their market," says Raquel. "They ask their own local SMEs to make it contextual for their specific region and then distribute it.” This has broken down silos and ensured employees have the knowledge they need.

Additionally, the 360Learning AI translation feature has reduced deployment time from months to days. “Instead of spending significant time and money on manual translations, we use AI for the initial draft and then have local authors refine it. This ensures our learning paths are ready for local deployment, empowering our teams to share expertise regardless of what language they speak,” explains Raquel.

Incentivizing Admin and SME contribution: The Global Learning Awards

Admin and SME contribution has been such a success at HEINEKEN that the team launched the Global Learning Awards, recognizing contributors for categories  like"Best Content Creation" and "Highest Collaboration Score."

Raquel highlights the strategic impact of this recognition: "By rewarding these collaborative behaviors, we’ve kept people engaged as well as accelerated knowledge sharing across the organization. “It was an incredible initiative to be a part of and people are still talking about it now!” she says.

AI: Making speed-to-market a reality 

HEINEKEN also integrated AI into its learning strategy with the primary goal of driving efficiency. Using 360Learning’s native AI course builder has been a "game-changer" for achieving speed-to-market.

According to Jodi: "We can take disparate documents, load them into 360Learning, and use strategic prompts to outline exactly what our audience needs. The AI crafts high-quality content—and even downloadable 'cheat sheets'—directly from those sources. Course authors can then add the human touch. It has transformed our process."

The ambassador network: Driving global adoption

To ensure local buy-in, HEINEKEN launched a regional Ambassador Program long before the official platform rollout.  Regional Ambassadors—including Jodi himself, who served as an ambassador in his previous role—were embedded into the development phase to co-create the platform’s design governance, and reporting. 

This early involvement shortened feedback loops and built strong regional connections, ensuring the global tool was shaped by local needs from day one.

"The goal was to empower OpCos to own the experience,” Jodi reflects. “By the time we launched, our OpCos had done such amazing work that we had a hard time picking a winner at our Learning awards ceremony.”

The results: A bottom-up revolution

Since launching these initiatives, HEINEKEN has seen a dramatic shift in its organizational learning.

Strong engagement and reach

The shift to a collaborative model has triggered a surge in engagement across the organization. HEINEKEN saw an 86% increase in learning consumption (unique individuals who started courses) over 6 months compared to 12 months on their previous platform. 

Raquel observes that this high adoption reflects a genuine cultural appetite for learning: "This showed us that people were willing to learn when they had the right tools for it and peer learning wasn't just a nice idea—it really was a necessity at our scale"

Rapid (and impactful) content creation

The "create once, deploy many" philosophy is delivering tangible results:

• Over 1,200 new courses created since go-live

• 50 courses shared in the Collaboration Hub within just two weeks.

• 155 Learning Needs raised in less than four months.

Local success in Egypt

The impact of collaborative learning is best seen at a local level, such as a learning program in Egypt. By combining global content and leveraging the platform’s ability to author custom content and schedule integrated classroom sessions, they created their own blended data Literacy path.

As Jodi explains, “this enabled participants to apply global concepts to various business use cases in their day-to-day environments, ensuring the learning was practical, repeatable, and directly linked to their roles."

Beyond the platform: Strategic impact

The partnership with 360Learning and deployment of collaborative learning has transformed HEINEKEN’s "Learn, Share, Reapply" ethos into a measurable competitive advantage. By moving beyond a top-down model, the company has addressed its core operational challenges through a decentralized, high-velocity ecosystem.

• Eliminating silos and skills gaps: The "create once, deploy many" philosophy has turned isolated expertise into a global asset. With 155 Learning Needs identified and over 1,200 courses created, HEINEKEN ensures that local teams rapidly close skill gaps by sharing and adapting proven, peer-vetted content rather than duplicating effort.

• Operational cost effectiveness: HEINEKEN has replaced expensive, redundant local programs with a co-authoring model. By allowing operating companies to fulfill global Learning Needs through localization, the organization ensures that budgets are spent on high-impact contextualization rather than starting from scratch.

• Time efficiency and speed-to-market: AI-driven workflows have made "speed-to-market a reality". Native AI tools and automated translation have slashed deployment times from months to days, allowing the organization to respond to business needs in real-time.

360Learning has been more than just a piece of new tech for HEINEKEN. As Jodi concludes, "it has allowed us to come together as one big learning community and has sparked a new mindset where collaborative learning is our biggest strength.”