Award-winning brew: 2016 victors SABMiller on a profitable learning initiative

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Brewing company SABMiller were the winners of the coveted overall trophy at the 2016 Personnel Today Awards. We spoke to Kadisha Lewis-Roberts, regional head of learning and development, about the huge impact its commercial learning initiative had on the bottom line.  Learning and development does not always have a reputation for dealing in hard metrics, but brewery company SABMiller set itself tough financial targets when it launched a key learning initiative, and exceeded them within a year. The initiative, known as Profitable Revenue Growth Management (PRGM) Thinking, has delivered more than $33 million in incremental profits since it launched, leading to it being crowned the clear overall winner at last year’s Personnel Today Awards. According to Lewis-Roberts, generating a profit was a condition of getting the initiative signed off. “We weren’t allowed to invest in this unless we could guarantee a significant financial return,” she says. The training was introduced at a point where the company was facing a tough time commercially – consumers have switched to buying more wine and spirits than beer and tend to purchase alcohol in supermarkets or online rather than in bars and cafes. “We needed to get out of this negative spiral of decline where we were getting into price wars with our competitors, and transform the way we thought about products,” says Lewis-Roberts. Furthermore, while PRGM Thinking was being embedded, the company had agreed to be acquired by AB InBev, a transaction that went through in late 2016. Since then, SABMiller’s Eastern European beer business has been acquired by the Japanese drinks company Asahi. The learning itself was rolled out to a