Client Background

Client:  A Food and Beverage Leader

Industry: F&B

Area of operations: ANZ 

No. of Employees: 1000

No. of Customers: The entire customer base can be classified into 8-10 heads

Any other relevant details such as annual revenue: $740 M

Challenge

In the food and beverage business, trade promotions are a critical driver of sales; planning, managing, and executing them successfully is vital part of the marketing mix. A leading food and beverage company based in Australia managed its trade promotion activities using spreadsheets and custom systems. With brands recognized and sold throughout Europe and Australasia, the company wanted to deploy a more transparent, integrated, and interactive system to manage its trade promotions. This new system should also provide sales teams with metrics that they could trust and subsequently leverage to improve sales.

Solution

Wipro recommended its Promax Advanced solution for a seamless approach to the entire trade promotion lifecycle. Using this platform, the Australian company leader was able to conduct annual planning, budgeting, promotions, approval workflow, and settlement. The integrated Promax solution also featured an easy-to-use, interactive UI, which encouraged adoption across the organization.

It was critical to ensure that the project timelines were in line with the customer’s annual planning cycle and a parallel ERP upgrade project.

With the Promax Advanced solution, the beverage company got a proven platform with an extensive presence in similar food and beverage companies in Australia and New Zealand. This ensured minimum risk of scope creep and also a high level of confidence in the stability of the system to support business decisions and the overall TPx transformations.

The project team ensured that the entire deployment was highly agile and Promax’s domain consultants led the entire transformation cycle by providing guidance on best practices to the business teams. The deep collaboration allowed the client to evaluate current processes in detail and design future processes aligned to best practices to achieve the transformational vision of the project.

Business Impact

1. Real-time data analysis enabled faster decision making and will ensure up to 3% improvement in promotional ROIs.
2. Employees throughout the business noted an improvement in the user experience. Time spent by users on promotional planning and related activities is seeing considerable reduction and the client aims to further improve it by 30% across functions such as Sales, Marketing, Operations, and Demand by best practices implementation in Promax.
3. The Agile approach to deployment ensured that both the project timeline and the costs had less than 10% divergence from the original high-level estimates.
4. The forecasting capability improvements driven by implementation of full integration between SAP IBP and Promax, promotion redemption rates, and overnight accrual integration have a inversely proportional impact on the occurrences of stockouts and stock overruns and capable of increasing forecast accuracy by up to 25%.
5. In a first for Promax, the Container Deposit Levy (crucially important to beverage companies) can now be reported on the balance sheet but not included in the P&L. Pricing integration (off-invoice discounts automated to SAP IBP) and trading terms integration will help users further in the quest for “single source of truth.”
6. Thanks to a new settlements process integrated in Promax, KAMs can process claims directly in Promax, completing the single system loop for all promotional activities.