Client background

Carlton & United Breweries (CUB) is an iconic beer company founded in the mid-19th century in Australia. The company possesses a diverse portfolio of over 400 brands, and produces Australia’s most successful beverages, including one of Australia’s highest selling beers. It has a presence across 50 countries and employs over 200,000 people.

Challenges

Wipro Promax Trade Promotion Management solution

A collaborative effort was put forth by Wipro and the client to implement Promax Trade Promotion Management solution. Promax served as a foundation for the business transformation desired by the client. They followed a comprehensive change approach that was holistically spread across people, processes and tools:

Tools – It started with Wipro’s Promax TPM tool that supported customization as per CUB's business requirements. It offered an easy-to-use system that addressed their complex customer model and product hierarchy, and offered real-time scenario modelling along with the ability to integrate with client’s ERP system.

Processes – Process understanding of the planning and commercial forums, promotion pricing review, and move from assumptions to fact based ROI insights that could help make better business decisions.

People – Includes not just the users of the system, but also those impacted – from sales to individual administrative users. Built commercial capability in users and set up training modules online for the users to learn about varying level of inputs and line items of the P&L and covering all aspects of forecasting and reporting.

Also, Wipro supported CUB from both offshore and onsite, and conducted comprehensive multiday training sessions that helped in a better user adoption across different regions.

Another part of this transition from a transactional TPM system to a data science based comprehensive TPM solution was a detailed documented step-by-step change approach which included a number of steps. This was a critical success factor in this transformation. These included the following:

Change impact assessment: This first step towards a comprehensive change approach helped the customer understand who and what part of business would be impacted.

Individual role review and change action plan: Organized the team structure and people in those roles that supported where the business was headed, and what the leadership needed to do to support them to be successful with the newly implemented change.

Phased go-live approach: This helped the customer get their teams using the system, and move them from not just volume planning, but also to effective volume forecasting to promotional forecasting reviewal plan to ROI.

Leadership engagement: The vision for the new change was shared by the senior leadership.

Team engagement: The old and new systems were running in parallel with different customer groups transitioning step by step to the new system.

Capability and training plan: This ensured that they had the right resources to support the teams that were transitioning to the new system.

Data science model for forecasting

• Data science based framework helped move from different excel based models to a consistent model that could be applied across the organization.
• More focus on building robust and good quality models at an initial stage that helped build confidence, and incrementally build more features.
• Enabled on-the-fly forecast update for users and generate what-if scenarios and judge the impact of the change and also the cost
• Further, it helped generating predictive promotion plans and also, baseline & multi-causal uplift models.

Business impact

Insights from the engagement

• TPM transformation is not only a technology project but a joint ambition across functions.
• Collaborative approach helps in building effective models and confidence in data science. This engagement included looking beyond standard marketing causals and incorporating new marketing causals like brand trajectory, category data, etc.
• One size doesn’t fit all companies. High level of adaptation was required to meet business needs.
  
• A lot of challenges existed at various levels of scan data, but the data significantly improves with time with strong statistical expertise in the interim.
• Senior management focus is critical to validate data modules effectively and ensuring better user adoption across the functions.

"The partnership with Wipro Promax has been key in supporting the transformation of the trade promotion landscape at CUB. Promax Advanced has the depth of capability ranging from seamlessly handling transactional trade to advanced data science based predictive forecasting and a lot more in between.

The implementation team has deep knowledge of the solution and Wipro’s global resourcing model has ensured a smooth deployment and robust steady state support"

- Arturo Reitz Associate Director of Commercial Solutions