Global consumer goods enterprises rely on robust distribution management systems to support business innovation; and ultimately to reach the right customers with the right brands and the right promotions.
Here is how Mindtree helped a top-three multinational consumer goods enterprise support its route-to-market transformation through a global distribution management solution.
The challenge
The customer had disparate distribution management systems across the globe, which were unable to support business innovations in its route to market, which led from the company to its distributors and retailers and finally to its consumers.
The consumer goods major therefore embarked on a business transformation program, aiming to improve its turnover by 2-3% by creating a global, scalable and repeatable business solution with advanced capabilities. This required an overhaul of its existing distribution management systems, which were outdated and unable to support business goals. The customer's systems also ran on disparate business processes across regions, lacked tight master data controls and carried a high total cost of ownership.
Our solution
Mindtree was selected to play a systems integration role with end-to-end responsibility for rollouts, support, application development and ongoing maintenance. Over a two-year period, we developed and implemented an SAP-based solution, with additional application hosting responsibilities.
Mindtree conducted multi-country workshops to understand the best process design; and held blueprint workshops for country teams to understand the proposed process and solution. The team then deployed the ASAP methodology for the implementation, with process and system gaps identified for improvement. Simultaneously, Mindtree familiarized country teams with the base line solution. We also set up a private cloud in collaboration with SAVVIS, the client's cloud partner, to allow the customer to better manage its infrastructure costs.
We realized that promotion management within SAP did not provide the functionality desired by client, and therefore developed a custom module to provide tighter control and monitoring of promotion spends. Today, the enterprise has a strong distribution management systems with global business processes. This helps optimize crucial elements such as price and promotion, directly affecting revenue and profit outcomes.
Business impact
- Greater turnover driven by improved product availability, promotion compliance and assortment
- Cost avoidance in hardware, software upgrades and run costs
- Cost savings of USD 15.5 million on store audits over a three-year period
