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InBev UK
Overview
InBev UK is a publicly traded company headquartered in Belgium. The company's origins date back to 1366, and today it is the No.1 global brewer. InBev’s strategy is to continue to strengthen its significant positions in the world's major beer markets through organic growth, world-class efficiency, targeted acquisitions, and by putting its consumers first. InBev has a portfolio of more than 200 brands, including Stella Artois®, Brahma® and Beck's®, its three global flagship brands. It employs some 70,000 people, and runs operations in 32 countries across the Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific. In 2003, the company realised a net turnover of more than €9.6 billion.
Challenge
In 2002, InBev UK became aware of changes occurring in its market place. The on-trade business sector was in decline; alterations in social behaviour meant that more people were choosing to drink at home rather than going out, and an increasing number of people in the UK were starting to choose wine instead of their usual beer brands. Spotting this trend, InBev decided to act fast to maintain its revenue – by developing existing relationships with the on-trade retailers and building new ones, volume sales would increase and they would return to a growth cycle.
In order to improve these relationships, InBev needed better information about retailers and their buying patterns, it also needed to invest resources in relationship marketing to sustain consistent business from these customers. InBev already had plenty of information about existing customers within the organisation, but it was not centralised or easy to access. Individual account managers kept contact details and information on buying patterns for their own accounts in their personal files, so any information retained was at risk of being lost as soon as a staff member left the company. The sales force needed a tailored, automated way to generate reports about their accounts so that they would have more time to concentrate on handling prospects and accounts, but because this information was spread throughout the company in different formats, it was impossible to analyse it.
The IS team at InBev realised that it needed to look outside its internal resources to find a solution to these problems. Its vision was to create a central location for all of the information about retailers so that the sales team could identify and build stronger, more profitable relationships. It also wanted to create a system for generating reports and analysis for it to use in its selling strategy. InBev had long term plans to implement a full CRM system, but in the meantime it wanted a solution that could address customer relationship requirements quickly.
Solution
Following In the first stage of the project, InBev decided to tackle how it handled existing customers; it chose Metastorm BPM™ – a Business Process Management software solution used by more than 1200 organizations across the world – to develop its ‘Customer Record Card’. “When we first started planning this project we had two options,” said Gavin Sewell, InBev UK Project Leader, “We could either purchase software to meet our requirements or write an application in Visual Basic. It soon became clear that Metastorm BPM was the obvious choice. We had a business requirement for a flexible solution that could be adapted as our business evolved. Metastorm’s joint application development approach was ideally suited to this purpose.”
Metastorm’s in-house consulting team implemented the software and managed the project in partnership with InBev. The flexibility of the software enabled InBev to implement various elements in stages, with the full system going live in December 2003, after only four months of work. InBev now has 200 licensed users on the Metastorm BPM system.
The Customer Record Card holds information on each customer, including demographic information, purchasing history and the history of the relationship to date. Having this information available allows the sales team to use the record card to manage relationships with customers. Metastorm BPM also provides a complete audit trail – so that InBev’s relationship with each prospect and customer can be monitored – as well as a reminder function so that call back and other actions can be brought forward if necessary. Once a lead has been closed, it is automatically re-routed to a ‘live accounts’ list so that account managers have an accurate overview of their accounts.
Having the record card in place gives InBev a way to access the data which it has purchased about its target accounts. This data is housed in a CGA Sequel database called the ‘Outlet Universe’, a database of 140,000 licensed outlets in the UK. The team is now able to search through and analyse the data and put activities into place to strengthen existing relationships and attack previously uncontacted outlets. It is also able to cross-reference the Outlet Universe against the information which is held in-house to ensure that data is clean. Having an indication of performance figures available – such as annual volumes – means an end to the cold calling and spreadsheets that were used before. The information feeds through Cognos Decision Stream software to provide a reporting function that makes market segmentation and targeted campaigns possible.
Results
The Outlet Universe and Metastorm’s BPM solution have enabled InBev’s field employees to take on responsibility for maintaining information about outlets and developing their own accounts, with full support from the marketing team. As a result, customer relations have dramatically improved. Since the system has been put in place, InBev UK has started to hit its sales targets. Gavin Sewell, Project Leader at InBev says “Introducing the Metastorm BPM system to our customer relationship activities has definitely made a huge impact on our success in this area, and I believe that it will become more and more significant as time goes by. The beauty of the system is that once it demonstrated how vital it is in one area, it is easily adapted as a solution to other problems.”
InBev has recently developed the system further to include other types of outlets, including nightclubs and high street pubs, buying groups, independent and indirect organisations, big pub chains and hotels. The information about these outlets comes from similar sources, and the existing record card template is easily adapted for all types of organisations. When this work is completed, InBev will achieve a level of visibility that will give it access to the entire universe of UK on-trade outlets – resulting in a very happy hour indeed.
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