Though knowledge management as such required both organizations to tap the knowledge and vast amount of information, the definition was quite different for both of them. For Frito Lays, the data and information was gathered mainly from the sales team and the performance indications of the company and the salespeople. The company gained basic knowledge in the form of sales figures, employees’ turnover, customer feedback, etc. The combined efforts were directed towards maximizing the business prospects and monetary gains for the company. The beginning of the case study says it all, “It takes more than good flavor and a hearty crunch to sell the salty snacks churned out at Frito-Lay.” The portal thus designed for the company, after gathering input using knowledge management tools, proved very useful for the sales team, the managers, and the company as such. But it had no interface for the customers or the general masses to interact with the company officials or the salespeople. Instead, it proved to be quite useful for the management team in assessing the performances, skill sets of their teams.
On the other hand, the RTA case study gathered data in the form of customer’s requirements as well as the employees’ feedback in serving the customers. Knowledge, in this case, was mainly generated from the newly developed Newcastle Call Centre (NCC), which was central to the concept of consolidating several smaller call centers into one large network. The NCC helped in providing useful info about the types of requests from the customers, the kinds of responses or suggestions provided, and the time consumed in the process. The stated objective of such networking was to provide better services and updated information to the customers, providing better skills to the customer support executives and reducing the average turnaround time for resolution of customer’s problems.