Confectionery maker Adams needed a system to service its wholesale
field representatives and meet the year 2000 deadline. Computer
Weekly finds out how it settled on a supplier and implemented its
CRM system
With Y2K looming Graham Bell, sales support manager at Adams the
confectionery manufacturer, had a ready-made deadline for the
implementation of a customer relationship management (CRM) and
mobile ordering system.
It was to replace a Dos-based bespoke system which was primarily
for order taking, did not offer much reporting capability and was
not Y2K-compliant.
The new system had to service a team of eight wholesale sales
representatives, each travelling a geographical region and visiting
100 wholesalers and cash-and-carry outlets across that region to
collect orders. The frequency of their visits depends on the
profile of the account and on the time of year - since one of
Adams' major lines is Halls cough sweets, its business is to some
extent seasonal.
Adams' systems selection exercise began in the latter half of 1998.
A challenging questionnaire was sent out, which elicited responses
from 25 suppliers. Adams' project team sifted through the responses
and came up with a shortlist of half a dozen names who were invited
to an evaluation day in a London hotel.
For the evaluation, Adams put together a team of interviewers
representing the interests of users from the sales and marketing
functions, IT management, plus the Y2K team and the finance
department.
"An important factor in our selection was the question of whether
we'd be able to work with the supplier in a joint team," recalls
Bell.
Adams completed its internal approval process in March 1999 and the
decision was made to award the contract to CRM provider
Tranzline.
As soon as that approval came through the project - called Sweet
(sales with enhanced electronic targeting) - kicked off in earnest.
The team was working under pressure because there was a Y2K freeze
from the end of September 1999 to March 2000, during which no new
systems were allowed to go live. It was, therefore, essential that
the system was in and working, in all important particulars, by
September, which left six months for development and
implementation.
"It was a good discipline, because there was no doubt about when we
were due to finish," says Bell.
That discipline encouraged Adams to identify the essentials and
distinguish them from nice-to-have features that could be added
later. The team was careful, however, to cut no corners in
verification and approval of the finished product and a lot of time
was dedicated to planning and carrying out acceptance tests.
Tranzline's technical solution was based on an off-the-shelf
product, CRMsoft, but it required tailoring to meet Adams' needs.
For example, the system needed not only to generate regular orders
to be fulfilled by the enterprise resource planning SAP system, but
also to record a special order where only an invoice was required
from the SAP system because stock had already been supplied by a
sales representative in the course of a visit.
In addition, Adams needed to automate some subsidiary tasks to make
life easier for the salesforce. When a cash-and-carry places an
order, Adams may have to provide point-of-sale display equipment
such as wire stands. The new system would make it easy for the
salesperson to generate the order for this equipment while they
were taking the order; it would then be sent separately via
Tranzline to a third-party warehouse - set up as a remote user on
the system - which fulfils that aspect of the order. So Tranzline
needed to write that part of the system on a bespoke basis.
However, the company says its software is designed to put as many
customer-facing processes as possible into the front-end
system.
The team was also careful to include key users in testing, just as
they had been involved in the selection process. As well as
encouraging end-users to feel that they owned the new system, that
had the practical advantage of giving them a hands-on feel for the
system well before it was due to go live.
Bell attributes the favourable reception that the system received
to the fact that the grassroots users, as well as the sales
managers, had been involved from the outset, even to the extent of
taking some sales people off the road to help with the project.
"The sales team contributed so much to the design and testing of
the system that it's not surprising we got a good level of buy-in,"
says Bell.
The project went sufficiently smoothly for the old system to be
switched off and the first chunk of Sweet to go live, on cue, in
September 1999.
In addition to its field salesforce, Adams also uses telesales
employees. They take orders, reactively and proactively, extending
and complementing the field salesforce. Just as there is a
structured plan for field staff, there is a similar plan, based on
customer profiles, to ensure that customers receive a telesales
call at the right time.
From the outset, it was seen as important that the telesales people
should share the same system and database as the field staff.
Bell explains, "The customer service team will sometimes telephone
where the account manager would normally call in person but for
some reason can't on this occasion. If the telesales person was to
put the record of that straight into the SAP system, it would not
show up on the Tranzline call history report. And it's essential
that when the reps go in to the customer records on Tranzline they
have the complete records."
To get the single view of the customer that its staff need, Adams
knew it would have to start putting the calls in via the Tranzline
system. Performance was particularly critical. With a customer
hanging on the phone, you cannot afford a system that is going to
slow up the order-taking process.
"Still within our initial implementation project, we undertook an
exercise to make sure that the system was at least as efficient as
the SAP system," says Bell.
Another important success factor was Adams' realism about what was
and was not worth pursuing. The communication between the
salesforce's laptops and the SAP system was simplified during the
project to meet time constraints, and an experiment with handheld
devices to support the retail salesforce was put on ice.
That pragmatism arose partly from the recognition that some aspects
of the project were being overtaken by the development of the
available technology, particularly mobile technology. Bell believes
that the next time Adams revisits its salesforce support
environment the end result will look totally different even though
the requirement will remain essentially the same.
In the meantime, Adams got a system that delivered what it was
looking for in terms of improved territory management and did it in
the required timescale.
An immediate benefit was improved journey planning. And because the
representatives' portable computers are updated nightly with the
latest version of the data - including any telesales activities at
head office - they can be confident that when they talk to and
advise customers, they are giving them the right information. The
information that is carried on the laptops includes order status,
so if a customer wants to discuss an outstanding order, the
representative can do so from a position of knowledge. Previously,
finding out an order's status would have meant going back to the
SAP system.
While much of the company's management information comes out of the
SAP system, Adams relies on Tranzline's system for marketing and
some sales information. Management information is sucked from the
system into an Excel pivot table where it can be interrogated and
manipulated by end-users.
This mechanism was chosen because it is very similar to the one
already used with the SAP system, so the managers did not have to
learn a new set of reporting tools. It is now possible for
management to track who is buying what and spot any trends in a way
that the previous system did not allow.
Looking back, Bell is particularly pleased with the way the
selection process was conducted and its outcome. "We knew that
implementing a new system and migrating to it in this timeframe
wasn't going to be easy - migration never is at the best of
times.
"But because our two companies were able to find out so much about
each other during the selection process, we were confident that
Tranzline was the best company to go with us through the pain. And
by the time we finished, they'd had plenty of opportunity to make
sure that they had the resources to deal with our requirements in
the time available."
What the BuyIT experts say...
Alistair Fulton, chairman, BuyIT, and president, Computing
Services & Software Association
BuyIT is pleased to include this case study in our best practice
series. Our aim is to find examples that others can emulate and we
think there is much in this case study that other IT solution
purchasers and their suppliers should heed.
The tightly specified project avoided being overlaid by lots of
additional nice-to-haves and the associated complexity that
bedevils so many projects. Helped by the narrow time window and a
clear understanding of the business requirements, the Adams team
and its supplier achieved the desired results and are now reaping
the benefits.
The selection process was a text-book example of how to identify
the right product and supplier. Some of the contenders who fell by
the wayside in this selection process were so focused on what they
wanted to sell that they failed to listen to the customer. The
supplier which succeeded was not only responsive to Adams' stated
requirements but had also designed its product to be able to
accommodate the specific needs of each customer - another plus.
Mike Kemp, managing consultant for CRM at Logica, and
chairman of the CSSA's CRM Group
The Adams project is an excellent example of best practice. The
project was well scoped with a clear business focus and had
executive sponsorship. There was a good partnership between
supplier and purchaser. However, buying and implementing the right
technology successfully is no good unless the users accept the new
system and the new ways of working which go with it. Again, Adams
got it right with early and continued involvement of the end-users
and a strong focus on training.
From a CRM perspective, Adams now has a single view of its
customers and can co-ordinate activities across both field and
telesales channels. It will be interesting to see what it does next
now that it has a CRM platform in place. Will the company introduce
an Internet channel to allow its wholesale customers to order
direct? Will it use the technology to gather more information about
customers and their needs? Or, will it build models of the value
and profitability of its customers so that it can target its effort
where it expects the biggest return?