MyPepsiCo: one global portal that also reaches the people without a desk

PepsiCo’s people work in offices, plants, labs and on sales routes, and many of them have no desk or company computer. In Mexico, the old portal could be reached only from PepsiCo’s network, so for frontline workers a shared kiosk at their site was the only way in. In a 2016 workshop, employees said the portal had “no order”, that it took many clicks to get anywhere, and that the newsletter still arrived as an email.

Each country had its own site. In Latin America “almost everything is manual”, people went to several services to reach one piece of information, and when they could not use a kiosk they asked their supervisor in person. In Brazil, HR information was split across different portals and some procedures meant carrying paper to HR. In China and Taiwan, the portals required a VPN.

PepsiCo wanted one global portal. The hard part was that it still had to feel local: in the employee’s language, with their country’s benefits and news, secured to the people it applies to, and written by local teams who know their people.

A foundation every region could share

From late 2015 we worked with PepsiCo’s teams on the foundation of the new MyPepsiCo, set up on IBM WebSphere Portal and Web Content Manager with the information architecture and components of our Portal Blueprint: content delivered by country and role, one experience shared by every region and business unit, and a governance model that lets local site owners and authors publish without waiting on IT.

Mexico first, kiosks included

In Mexico we built personalized dashboards and sites for Corporate Communications, Human Resources, Operations and IT. Frontline employees got a home page of their own, with their benefits, their pending requests and a launcher for their work tools, reachable from the site kiosks. It went live in November 2016, in Spanish, and the old portal was retired.

Region after region, frontline included

Latin America’s HR sites followed in 2018, for the Caribbean and Central America, the Andean countries and the Southern Cone: an audience of 17,600 people, 9,000 of them frontline, with content secured by level, country and legal entity. Brazil followed in early 2019 for 14,000+ employees, in Brazilian Portuguese, and China and Taiwan in 2019, in Simplified and Traditional Chinese, with benefits and policies for each.

Teams that run it themselves

Every move came with content inventory and clean-up, migration, and training for the local authors, tailored to who they write for, from frontline employees to directors, so each region could keep its own sites current after we left.

By 2019, employees from Mexico to Brazil, the Andes, China and Taiwan found their benefits, policies and news on one global portal, in their own language (MyPepsiCo supports 25), instead of a separate site per country, and frontline workers had pages written for them. More than 200,000 pieces of content moved onto MyPepsiCo.

We set up its foundation in 2015, moved the regions onto it and supported it until 2021, alongside the sites we built on the same foundation for R&D, marketing, compliance and HR.