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DB Breweries: Brewing online business

New Zealand-based brewer DB Breweries was the first in the Asia-Pacific to implement SAP’s new web channel experience management solution, to provide a customer web shop for its beer and other merchandise. Eleanor Reader reports.

Background

Since opening its doors in 1929, DB Breweries has established itself as one of New Zealand’s most well-known companies.

The second largest brewer in NZ operates as a 100 per cent subsidiary of parent company, Heineken N.V., and manages four breweries across the country – Monteith’s Brewery, Waitemata Brewery, Tui Brewery and Mainland Brewery.

 

DB has a long history with SAP, first implementing the software in 2003 and most recently upgrading its core SAP system to ECC 6.0.

Problems arose when they realised the level of service they were providing their customers wasn’t up to scratch, says Mike Rawson, knowledge management team leader, DB Breweries.

Purchasing merchandising material from the brewer was more difficult than necessary for DB’s trade customers, as orders were only able to be lodged during business hours and were being processed by a third party.

“We had a requirement to service our customers better and also to give them more flexible hours of operations and get a better brand presence,” Rawson says.

DB engaged UXC Oxygen as the implementation partner to roll out a number of new SAP solutions aimed at improving business efficiency across its operations.

UXC Oxygen has previously worked with DB in the past, including on the latest ECC upgrade, so was the most obvious candidate for the project, according to Rawson.

“UXC Oxygen had a very good understanding of our landscape and they had good experience in web channel experience management (WCEM) or customer portals, so we felt quite comfortable with them and contracted them as a partner for that journey,” he says.

Rawson says selecting SAP’s latest web technology was a logical step forward for the brewery.

“We are an SAP-oriented vendor and we opted for the best technology available. Although the product was untested in the local market, we undertook a proof of concept at the start of the project to ensure we mitigated any potential issues.”

Implementation and challenges

The first step in the rollout was to implement a customer web shop – the first of its kind in the Asia Pacific – using SAP’s latest WCEM software.

The project had very clear objectives, says Rawson: “We needed to be able to offer the customers 24/7 flexibility for their ordering, needed a better brand experience and we needed to reuse some of the brand campaigns that were used on some of our other websites and the mydb.co.nz website.”

Rawson says the web shop was built to help DB better service customers by providing them with a more direct and consistent means of engagement with the brewer.

“Customers will be able to order from us through the web shop at any time of the day or night – not just during business hours. All our DB beer products as well as associated merchandise – such as glasses, coasters and other branded items – will be available for ordering online at a time that suits the customer.”

The project took three months and came in on time and on budget at the end of November 2012.

People have commented to Rawson that it was an impressively fast turnaround, but he says the short timeframe of the project was one of its biggest hurdles.

“It was challenging in the fact it touched multiple areas of the business, including finance and master data. It was quite a broad set of challenges that had to be coordinated right through the business,” he added.

UXC Oxygen and DB worked together to deploy SAP CRM and WCEM. The team consisted of three to four main core consultants from Oxygen, two full-time resources and a number of part-time resources from the business side.

The companies worked from a standard blueprint from the beginning, however their lack of experience with the new solution saw them adopting an agile process onsite.

“We decided that we would use agile to get a much sharper set of responses for the development we were doing, and that involved bringing customers in at quite an early stage in the development, so we could actually understand how they wanted to use the site. The most important thing we did know is you only get one chance to launch a website and it may be functionally good, but if the customers don’t like it, then it’s all over,” he says.

The go-live of the web shop went very smoothly and the transaction load is continuing to increase.

Business benefits and future plans

Customer feedback since the launch of the web shop has been extremely positive, with many impressed by the timeliness of the implementation and the ability to order products 24/7.

“It has been a successful first step in the implementation of our comprehensive CRM roadmap and the feedback we are getting from customers and users is very positive,” says Rawson.

The self-service aspect of the store means that customers are receiving their products much faster than they were previously.

“The products used to be sent out from our rep and it wasn’t that high on their priority list, so the customers have now got control of their destiny,” Rawson says.

UXC Oxygen CEO, Stuart Dickinson, says the implementation was an important one for both UXC Oxygen and SAP, who worked together closely to prepare the software for implementation at DB.

“The solution provides a rich web experience for users and makes e-commerce easier to manage for both the vendor and the customer. It will be the solution SAP customers turn to if they want a straightforward means of deploying a B2B e-commerce capability that can be easily integrated with their existing financial and customer management functions,” he says.

The web shop launch in November was a reasonably soft one, however now they know the site is solid, DB is currently in the process of “ramping it up”, says Rawson.

Over the coming months, DB plans to deploy SAP CRM functionality further to provide field representatives with a user-friendly mobile sales application, improve contact centre operations and more easily manage trade promotions.

“We selected UXC Oxygen for this programme of work because they displayed the deepest understanding of what we wanted to achieve and had customer experience relevant to our industry to back it up.”

In an effort to provide representatives with a user-friendly mobile sales application, DB has rolled out Sybase Unwired Platform 2.2 and Afaria.

In the same week, they rolled out phase two of their biller direct product, which allows customers to look at their financial statements and details online 24/7.

Following that, they planned to deliver the Retail Execution 3.0 solution, which deploys the infield apps that the reps will use to do all their visits to clients.

To improve customer centre operations, Interaction Centre to CRM will also be rolled out to its contact centre.

 

Rawson credits UXC Oxygen with being a very valuable business partner throughout the SRM journey so far.

“We know that when we go live with SUP and Afaria that next week it will transfer over to their AMS service, which basically does all the support functions for our landscape. What we like about UXC Oxygen is the complete solution that we get from them.”

To check out the web shop in action, visit www.mydb.co.nz.

This article was originally published in Inside SAP Winter 2013.

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