Case study
Industry
Manufacturing
Company HQ
New York, USA
Number of Employees
300,000+
Office Locations
North America, Latin America, Africa & Middle East, Europe, Asia, Pacific
PepsiCo creates an award-winning culture of operational excellence with the Udemy Business Leadership Academy
Udemy driving business outcomes
Case study details
PepsiCo, a global food and beverage leader, delivers iconic brands like Lay’s, Doritos, and Gatorade to consumers over a billion times a day across more than 200 countries. In 2024, the company generated nearly $92 billion in revenue, driven by its commitment to innovation, scale, and sustainability.
PepsiCo is a long-time partner of Udemy Business Leadership Academy (UBLA), but when Paul Kent took on the role of Senior Learning and Development Manager in 2021, he looked to reassess the way it used the platform. His goal was to deliver a more outcomes-focused approach to establish operational excellence and greater agility across PepsiCo’s supply chain activities.
Through the Udemy Business Leadership Academy, and its ‘Unlocking End-to-End Supply Chain Agility’ program, Paul has been able to revolutionize the way knowledge is shared across the company.
Breaking down silos and establishing outcome-led learning
Supply chains are always susceptible to the whims of the global market and world events. When Covid struck in 2020, PepsiCo put emergency measures in place to handle supply chain disruption. In the process, it discovered new efficiencies, and was also reminded of an important lesson – disruption is never far away.
“Covid is just one example of the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world we live in,” says Paul Kent, Senior Learning and Development Manager at PepsiCo. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a pandemic, a war, or a cost of living crisis – there are lots of things that can change our paradigm. We were a fantastic company in a crisis when it came to reacting to change, but what we weren’t good at was predicting barriers and uncertainty and having processes established to act in an agile way.”
As a global company, PepsiCo also faced the challenge of working in silos, which meant there were separate pockets of knowledge and best practices that could yield significant benefits if united. Kent’s ambition was to create a more agile and united procurement organization, one that could predict disruption, take it in its stride, and embed new efficiencies across various processes. The goal was to achieve operational excellence across the department. And that had to start with a change in its approach to learning and development.
“Traditionally, we measured the success of learning initiatives based on how people reacted to them; did they enjoy the course, did they like the instructor, things like that,” says Kent. “What we needed to do was bring a more outcomes-focused approach to our learning. That meant partnering with the functional business to understand what we need, and then implementing a learning and development capability that would serve those goals.”
Senior Learning and Development Manager, PepsiCo
PepsiCo enrolls in the Udemy Business Leadership Academy
Kent had inherited UBLA when he took on his role in the PepsiCo University, the company’s learning and development body, and it was a relationship he was eager to develop.
“There were a couple of things about UBLA that stood out,” he says. “The first was it was a true social learning platform, whereas a lot of other platforms provided content without context. The other part was that we formed a really good relationship with the people at UBLA early on. That became really important, because I wanted to change the model and integrate our own learning and internal expertise with the Leadership Academy content.”
In 2020, PepsiCo launched a pilot of the ‘Unlocking End-to-End Supply Chain Agility’ program through UBLA. The Academy offered a range of learning benefits for PepsiCo’s users, including multi-modal learning, the ability to contextualize and tailor the program to meet specific requirements, and a direct link with professors from Penn State University who provide the theory behind end-to-end supply chain best practices.
“The university link was key,” says Kent. “Access to the level of education you get through a university is incredibly valuable. For a lot of our salaried staff that attended university years ago, it means they’re able to update their knowledge in line with the way our industry has changed. And for those that never attended, it gives them the opportunity to learn theories that align with their experience in the role or provide them with new ways of approaching problems.”
New ways to ensure learning sticks
Today, PepsiCo has run the program 35 times, providing learning to more than 1,200 employees through a combination of asynchronous and live online classes. These classes are delivered by PepsiCo’s internal experts and a selection of external leaders in the field of procurement.
Through a combination of expert-led content and collaborative learning activities, participants gain new insights into supply chain dynamics. The courses cover a range of topics all related to functional excellence, including strategic agility, integration, and cultural transformation, with completion rates of up to 98%.
One of the biggest challenges with any learning and development initiative is making sure that theory is turned into practice after a course is complete. To this end, one of the main principles behind the program is that users are encouraged to take their real-world problems into the learning activities so there’s a tangible outcome attached.
With the help of Udemy, Kent also initiated a nudging strategy to encourage people to continue learning after a course is completed. “The idea is that I’m going to give you a tiny piece of information, and I’m going to do that regularly for 15 to 20 days,” he says. “If you start building that as a habit then people retain the learning. The Udemy team came up with a process that automated that nudging, which was really important to us.”
This, in addition to digital badging and regular office hours that allow users to check in with experts, has seen widespread adoption across PepsiCo’s procurement teams.
Senior Learning and Development Manager, PepsiCo
Collaborative learning across a global supply chain
For Kent, the true value of UBLA can be summarized by both individual and business benefits. From an individual point of view, attrition rates within the company have dropped, and the NPS feedback PepsiCo gets from courses has gone from 42 in 2021 to 74 in 2024. Perhaps most importantly, with a new set of skills, PepsiCo’s supply chain experts can progress their careers.
“What we know is, from a personal development point of view, the promotion rates for those that undertake these programs is significantly higher than those that don’t,” Kent says. “We completed a peer analysis over a three-year period that showed promotion rates more than doubled for those who successfully completed a structured PepsiCo University program.”
Of course, personal development inevitably contributes to business development, and the lessons learned through the Leadership Academy have led to tangible improvements to PepsiCo’s agility, resilience, and competitiveness. Perhaps the biggest change is the way the program facilitates cross-functional collaboration and shared, innovative thinking – a vital element in overcoming siloed procurement operations across the company.
“We can see from an Operations point of view how this has changed our way of thinking,” says Kent. “By putting cross-sector teams from around the world on the same program, and encouraging conversation, it expanded people’s networks and we saw instant successes. We’ve started at a global level and then perfected our approach locally.”
Greater agility in the face of change
This ability to share ideas and collaborate over learning has enabled PepsiCo’s procurement teams to usher in several new initiatives that enable a more proactive approach to operations. These include a global crop tool that measures potato growth to identify future low yields, predictive modeling to predict soda demands, and GPS trackers on trucks that enable them to find the lowest cost refueling spots. In other instances, approval processes have been reduced from 11 steps to as few as three.
“There are pockets of excellence everywhere in the company,” says Kent. “By sharing best practices across departments, we’re able to expand on those pockets. We’re combining real life, work life, and true learning.”
As a result of these initiatives, PepsiCo has seen direct savings through improved fleet management, as well as greater efficiency in turnaround times and a growing supply network. The company also estimates it made direct cost savings of over $2m from 2022-2025 in running these courses through Udemy rather than through in-person, instructor-led events.
Last but certainly not least, the learning program saw PepsiCo named as a winner for the Best Hybrid Learning Program at the 2024 Brandon Hall Awards.
Senior Learning and Development Manager, PepsiCo
A roadmap of learning excellence
As the relationship between PepsiCo and Udemy has developed, Kent continues to play an active role in curating the next steps in PepsiCo’s learning journey, always looking to build on what exists and take it to the next level.
“I’m constantly looking for what’s next and what we can improve on,” he says. “I recently went to Miami to meet with Udemy and see how we can further link learning to our seven pillars of procurement delivery, so that’s what we’re working on now.”
His enthusiasm has proven contagious, too, with members of his procurement team buying extra Udemy content from their own budgets; further evidence that a true culture of learning now exists in the organization – and it might just be the first step on a long journey.
“Udemy, as a partner, has been brilliant for me,” says Kent. “Probably one of the best partners I’ve ever worked with as a professional. So the next steps are about making sure we continue to seek to align strategies and realize success.”
Senior Learning and Development Manager, PepsiCo
Senior Learning and Development Manager, PepsiCo
Read more success stories
