Better-Business-Akademie

Kompania Piwowarska (SABMiller Group): Managing Marketing Campaigns

More effective campaigns of the manufacturer of Tyskie and Lech Beers

It is commonly believed that only 50% of marketing expenditures are effective. Unfortunately, it is hard to tell which 50% and when. A system solution has been launched in Kompania Piwowarska to facilitate the identification of the right half.

From an Idea to Action

On 1 April 2008, Kompania Piwowarska (KP) saw a productive launch of the Wallet solution, a tool for effective planning, management and control of marketing expenses. The concept of the solution was developed by a KP Project Team, composed of the representatives of Brand Marketing, Trade Marketing and Finance.

The Team faced a difficult challenge to accommodate the interests of all involved functions. On the one hand, Marketing insisted on maximum flexibility in order to be able to quickly respond to the changing market situation with tailored marketing activities. On the other, Finance emphasized the need to oversee the budget performance and spending effectiveness.

BCC was hired to transform the concept into an IT solution.

Purpose of the System

The system was supposed to support the management of marketing campaigns using various IT Technologies. Projects of this kind are often implemented concurrently by the head office and regional branches and have nationwide reach.

An example can be direct-to-consumer promotion launched on a national scale which requires involvement and collaboration of a number of corporate functions. Brand Marketing is responsible for the development of the promotion concept and ensuring support of national media. Trade Marketing prepares promotional material and executes the promotional campaign in retail POS and restaurants in all regions of Poland. PR informs the journalists about the campaign and ensures proper perception of the campaign by the media.

Coordination of all the tasks and making sure the budget will not be exceeded is a difficult responsibility of the Project Managers. The implemented solution will greatly facilitate their job.

At the same time, the Finance Department has detailed knowledge and control over the budgets of particular projects and their structure and can monitor the introduced changes.
In addition to inventing creative solutions, planning and implementing, part of a marketing project is to define the amount of money which we are ready to spend to achieve particular goals. Hence, we need to draft our budget for the planned actions.

The role of the IT system is to support people in defining and allocating budgets, determining the targets, spending the money and controlling the effectiveness of expenditures.

The IT system is also expected to reduce the employees’ workload by eliminating simple and repeatable operations and facilitating data entry and access to information. In the case of KP Marketing staff, such operations include defining project components, creating and searching for orders.

The volume of recorded data also contributes to the employees’ workload. During a single budget year, a number of projects are implemented by KP. The projects are composed of numerous activities which form subprojects. For each activity, a number of orders can be created and a single order usually consists of a number of items.

Valuable time of an employee should be spent on creative activities. Today, you don’t need to use an abacus when drafting budgets. The IT system will not let you allocate more money than you have, nor can you book amounts which exceed the predefined limits. Can it get any simpler?

Talking about simplification, user interface in the system is of key importance. The operation of the system is ergonomic and does not require any redundant actions. Whenever possible the system facilitates data entry, checks their correctness and issues clear messages. All the benefits are so valuable due to the fact that the system is used by lots of people all over Poland.

The operating efficiency of the system is also significant, including the response time to user actions (e.g. data searching or saving).

In addition to supporting budget performance control, Wallet helps to draft and update marketing expenditures plan i.e. estimated distribution of marketing expenses over time. Thanks to the update functionality of budget plans, ongoing monitoring of the level of expenditures is possible. For instance, if during a certain planning period a project generates savings, the funds can be reallocated to other, unplanned activities and vice versa: when a budget of one project is exceeded, savings in other areas need to be sought.
All those functionalities, combined with a carefully planned set of system reports, provide information necessary for effective management of projects and brands at all levels.

Wallet in SAP

The scope of Wallet encompasses SAP Project System (PS), Materials Management (MM), Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW) and SAP NetWeaver Portal 7.0. From the point of view of data processing, the role of PS is central. The area is responsible for managing the structure of budgets and for storing and controlling additional user rights applied in the Wallet solution.

A KP staff using Wallet does not need to remember the transaction numbers to execute various activities. In the portal solution, Wallet starts from the web browser level and passes from one screen to another in a sequence reflecting the logic of data entry or data viewing.

Unlike in SAP GUI, when entering the data, the employee is not confronted with a large number of fields, many of which are completely unnecessary. The value selection options on the lists have been restricted only to those which are relevant to the current task.

In the development of Wallet, a technology called Web Dynpro for Java was used. The technology ensures effective removal of errors, quick modifications to the existing application and practically unlimited options of expanding the existing solution.

The elements on the deepest level of the WBS (Work Breakdown Structure – PS) are called activities and they represent the real marketing activities.In the Wallet solution activities are created in SAP NetWeaver Portal.

Thanks to the use of WWW technology, the interface is easy to operate by all users. The way in which information is displayed has been simplified and adapted to the needs of KP, based on the input from their staff.

After the Launch

Following the successful launch of the portal part of the solution, other parts of Wallet are planned to be implemented based on the SAP Portal platform. As a result, a bigger portion of Wallet will be integrated within the portal and the users will spend more of their time operating in only one environment instead of two (SAP GUI and the portal).

Furthermore, the new functionalities implemented in the SAP portal will help to simplify the user interface, as compared to the one currently used by standard SAP transactions.