The largest SAP CRM project in this part of Europe

High stakes

In 2004 Grupa Żywiec decided to start a multi-phase implementation of SAP CRM. The project’s aim was to enforce the company’s market standing, first of all through optimizing customer service and improving communication between commercial, distribution, marketing and maintenance departments. It has been one of the group’s key IT projects in recent years.

On starting the SAP CRM project the group was greatly decentralized in terms of processing data necessary to serve customers.

The employees of the sales department both in traditional and modern channels as well as specialists in distribution companies spoke the same language, but, without a common platform for information exchange they were not able to record their customer relations in a uniform way, not to mention recording customer’s master data or marketing actions.

CRM projects are said to be important, but by no means easy. All the more so because they are performed at the meeting point between the company and the customer. The multi-phase SAP CRM implementation at Grupa Żywiec should be considered more than difficult. Its participants had to face challenges in many areas, that is why CRM implementation from the beginning had been planned as a multi-phase and long-term one. 

Challenge 1. Scale

As is the case with the earlier SAP ERP implementation, the scale of the company undoubtedly influenced the SAP CRM implementation. Currently Grupa Żywiec inludes five breweries and a dozen distribution companies (Żywiec Trade) as well as the Grupa Handlowa, which focuses on marketing and commercial activities.

Its direct customers are all distribution channels in retail commerce, catering industry, modern trade and wholesale trade. A few hundred sales representatives take care of customer service. A project for such a complex organization needs careful preparing. It is impossible, for example, to gather a large number of users for training in one place. Particular function groups were started as a trial in single regions and then rolled out to the remaining areas.
Sometimes next stages of the project overlapped partly, when stable system functions were transferred onto next regions and at the same time the project team executed and tested a next function group.

Challenge 2. Changes 

A problem of sorts in the CRM project were simultaneous changes which directly or indirectly influenced the implementation. The years 2004-2006 witnessed Poland’s accession to the EU (and the related changes in the law), business and legal consolidation of the Grupa Żywiec’ breweries, also a takeover of Brau Union Polska along with its breweries and brands.

Some implementation participants, e.g. project team managers or IT employees – were involved in the above projects, too. Setting common dates for project meetings is in such circumstances an additional challenge, as all the dates of the competitive projects must be taken into consideration.

Challenge 3. IT landscape 

It is worth focusing a little on the complex IT context of the project. Grupa Żywiec uses two ERP transactional systems: SAP and Microsoft Dynamics. Into such a varied environment of IT systems the project had to fit another one: the SAP CRM system along with mobile applications for sales departments.

During concept works of the SAP CRM implementation it was assumed that CRM would in some areas, e.g. in the Żywiec’s customer master data management, be the priority system. Consequently, CRM had to be connected with other systems in the organization. To achieve this, besides the SAP CRM itself, Grupa Żywiec implemented the SAP NetWeaver integration platform and first of all its component, SAP XI (SAP Exchange Infrastructure).
The CRM project’s key assumption was the possibility to access the data in SAP CRM also by mobile devices (notebooks and PDA devices), without a necessity of constant connection with the net.

An important part of new solutions was a developed reporting system, processing and providing management data from various systems. That is why an important item in the SAP CRM project was a development of SAP BW data warehouse.

The recipe is staging the project 

When planning a CRM project, maybe even more so than with an ERP system implementation, the organizational changes related to it and performed along must be taken into consideration. CRM implementation forces many changes in business processes. The organization must have time to get used to the changes and work on them before the implementation moves on to other areas.
Otherwise there is a risk that some concepts that seemed good in theory and during tests will not prove practical when faced with large-scale operations. In such key areas as product distribution and commercial contact with customers stoppages or engthening of business processes must not be allowed.

In Grupa Żywiec the stages of CRM implementation focused on the areas where improving company’s organization most influences customer service, regardless of the stage of customer interaction, starting from marketing activities, to sales and delivery to post-sale service and maintenance.

The support of this part of the multi-stage project was commissioned to BCC, the company which had supported a comprehensive SAP ERP implementation for Grupa Żywiec and other projects.

During the most intensive works the project involved about 60 people (Żywiec employees and consultants) working in eight working teams.

From the end of 2004 to the beginning of 2007 next functional areas of SAP CRM started: Business Partner, Marketing and Mobile Sales (a mobile application for sale managers). Moreover, within the project and on the basis of SAP CRM and SAP ERP applications, the solutions that support management of advertising materials and commercial fixed assets were started. The teams also prepared a system of analyzing and reporting based on SAP BW data warehouse. The last stage, completed in spring 2007, was implementing by Anica System SA, seated in Lublin, a mobile EBI system of the Sales Force Automation type (SFA). The application works on PDA devices and closely cooperates with the SAP CRM system.
Client’s language
The advantages of SAP CRM implementation concern not only numerous aspects of customer transactions, from managing the data base of partners to the analysis system.

Implementing the SAP CRM module called Business Partner constitutes the basis for any other advantages. Thanks to the SAP CRM project Grupa Żywiec has a central data base of business partners with data that help develop partner relationships.
A common customer data base, available for all the concerned, involved in customer service, is a starting point for planning marketing activities. Having information on the customers’ habits and preferences on an area or in a segment one can plan and execute marketing campaigns closely adjusted to the profile and needs of the target group, and, consequently, boost sales as the marketing becomes more effective.

The POS (point of sale) functionality of managing materials and fixed assets, based on SAP CRM and SAP ERP, supports managing all that is passed on to sales outlets and is not for sale, like fridges or company furniture, that remains the property of Grupa Żywiec, but also disposable materials, e.g. stands prepared only for one promotional campaign.

Combining the SAP BW data warehouse with ERP (SAP and MS Dynamics) and SAP CRM systems makes it a perfect source of data on all the above aspects of operations. Within the CRM implementation project new SAP BW reports were created; this also is an area of constant development.

It is worth emphasizing that Grupa Żywiec was one of the first clients to use SAP BW in Poland, and its internal IT team has a wide experience and competencies in the area, which helped them carry out implementation works by themselves, with minimal support on the part of external consultants.
On SAP NetWeaver

Cooperation with external specialists was, on the other hand, very important when constructing an integration solution. BCC consultants assisted the IT team of Grupa Żywiec in integrating SAP CRM with other systems, mainly with the SAP ERP system used in the breweries, MS Dynamics of the Żywiec Trade units and the mobile application.

Integration of SAP CRM with other systems was based on the SAP NetWeaver platform (SAP XI – Exchange Infrastructure technology), which helps support business processes running in a few systems simultaneously.

Grupa Żywiec is one of the first enterprises in Poland to use SAP NetWeaver-based integration on such a large scale.

Large-scale integration

Challenges to integration works were: a large number of interfaces, several communicating systems and the sheer volume of data integrated. The project resulted in creating and starting the interfaces concerning master data of business partners, relationships, marketing features, product information and transactional data.

Daily information exchange between a sales representative working in the market and the back office generates a huge number of communications. SAP XI in Grupa Żywiec processes about 60-80 thousand messages daily.

Those are messages of great importance for day-to-day operations of the Group, as they are directly reflected in customer service. Due to this particular attention was paid to efficiency, stability and simplicity of monitoring when designing the interfaces.

As to the maintenance of SAP XI, Grupa Żywiec decided on outsourcing and entrusted BCC with administration of the SAP XI integration solution.

The project important for the market

The SAP CRM system in Grupa Żywiec is now used by sales staff – sales representatives, operations managers, sales analysts, customer service specialists in each distribution unit as well as marketing employees in the company’s headquarters.

In terms of the number of users it was one of the largest SAP CRM implementations in Europe and the largest in Heineken. In our region of Europe there had been no comparable SAP CRM enterprise before. Many solutions were started for the first time in Poland.

The implementation of SAP CRM at Grupa Żywiec resulted in a significant improvement of many processes in customer interactions. So far we have had few successful CRM projects on such a scale in Poland. We hope that the described example will convince the companies that are considering SAP CRM implementation, but are afraid of such challenges as those that Grupa Żywiec overcame.