Overview

Heineken is one of the largest US importers of various portfolios of beer. Understanding that they needed to improve their insight into the planned sales by over 600 beer distributors nationwide, Heineken turned to Chateaux to help craft a solution by which they would be able to (a) better forecast beer distribution, (b) minimize spoilage due to overstocking product and (c) decrease the number of missed sales opportunities resulting from a lack of inventory.

The Challenge

They needed a solution that would give each of its distributors the ability to provide an estimated quantity of each package format of beer they planned to sell on a monthly basis.  They had a repository of information necessary to provide past performance quantities to the distributors as a benchmark for making plan estimates, but no means to present the data to the distributors.  The application needed to be secure but accessible by each individual distributor through a centralized portal.  In addition they needed to provide efficient reporting of the data once the plan was entered for analysis and collaboration with the distributors and to help streamline their supply chain.
                     
The Approach

Chateaux has designed, developed and implemented a custom web-based application accessible outside of the company firewall to all distributors via secure login through an SAP portal.  The application allows representatives from each distributor to enter monthly plan information by packages for multiple brand portfolios of beer.  The data captured represents estimates of product sales as well as distribution across all accounts that are supplied with the client’s product.

The application was built using Microsoft .NET technology with an Oracle data warehouse back-end.  Chateaux developed all ETL procedures to generate aggregated data in order to maximize the application speed and insure data accuracy.

Chateaux experts worked with management at the client to derive business rules for allocation of plan estimates based on a variety of factors such as seasonality, regional sales trends and previous sales performance.  Using these business rules Chateaux has developed functionality that allocates a total plan estimate entered for a brand across all package formats and months.  Users also have the ability to manually fine tune plan estimates after the initial plan allocation.

Web designers at Chateaux have designed an intuitive workflow for the application’s user-friendly step-by-step plan entry process.  Users are guided through a chronological series of screens designed in such a way that minimal training is required.  Chateaux’s graphics experts designed all images, color-schemes and backgrounds to provide a pleasant professional graphical interface for the application.

The WebIntelligence SDK technology was used to integrate access to BusinessObjects reports along with drop downs within the application to change the report parameters.   Chateaux’s report developers worked with the client’s reporting and data analysis staff to provide a suite of reports and scorecards that provide both graphic and numeric representations of distributor performance to plan that are simple to read and clear enough for even the most novice user.   Reports are presented in PDF format and are available for download for both distributors as well as the client’s internal managers for performance and plan review meetings with the distributors.  All reporting is secure and restricts data based on the login credentials.

The distributor is guided to a sign off and locking screen to finalize the plan and notify management that the distributor’s plan is ready for review and available to start tracking performance and more efficiently manage beer distribution to the distributor.

The Result

The client is now able to gather and store plan data from all of the distributors it services.  Inventory at the distributors is more easily and efficiently managed in compliance with the forecast of sales from the source that best knows the seasonal and demographic effects on the sales trends of the client’s products; the distributors.

The planning application gives the client’s salespeople more insight into the expected volume of sales at the distributors they manage and helps them gauge when to promote a specific package and at which distributors a package is more widely sold.  They are able to reference reports generated from the planning data throughout the annual business cycle to help facilitate up-to-date decisions on orders and product promotions.

Senior management has a high-level understanding of sales expectations at a regional level.  They can monitor their sales force more efficiently as to which areas of the country are meeting expectations and which salespeople might need incentives to sell more of a specific product or into a certain region.

SO009