Early in my career, I stayed in an authentic ryokan inn in Kyoto. It was straight out of a 19th century Hiroshige woodblock print with a Japanese garden, hanging lanterns, sliding rice paper doors and a stunning view of Mount Fuji at sunrise. After work, my colleague and I discovered the local dishes and Suntory scotch – a first.
Today, Suntory’s food and beverage products are enjoyed globally, including Suntory Oceania, a partnership of Beam Suntory and Frucor Suntory offering a broad spectrum of beverages across Australasia.
International beverage company produces more than 30 million cases per year
Since the 1960s, Frucor Suntory has evolved from a small, local fruit juice company to a major international beverage company producing more than 30 million cases of drinks annually at its New Zealand-based factory.
The company produces, sells and distributes a range of fruit juices, fruit drinks, energy drinks, water and soft drinks, such as V Energy, Suntory BOSS Coffee, Maximus, h2go, Just Juice, The Real McCoy and Fresh Up. It also bottles the Pepsi product range for PepsiCo in New Zealand.
But Frucor Suntory’s twenty-year-old sales automation system prevented this. During customer meetings, salespeople had to combine up to four different siled tools to access data on-premises and in the cloud. The tools also did not work well offline, which frustrated both field staff and customers.
Uniting four separate sales tools into one iOS mobile app for easy data access
Frucor Suntory’s outdated local sales automation system spread information across multiple tabs and locations. The company realized that salespeople needed access to consolidated information through a simple user interface. But simple is just as complex.
To address what was holding sellers back, the company needed to improve the user and customer experience with smart information available at the right time. This meant that the company no longer had to switch back and forth between multiple applications during a sales call to gather the necessary information.
Additionally, they needed standardized processes during sales meetings that would populate the CRM with the right data. This, in turn, would enable the field service to deliver the desired results with seamless online/offline workflows. And looking ahead, the company wanted built-in flexibility to support new markets and changing consumer demands, such as drinks with or without sugar.
Furthermore, by optimizing the sellers’ daily customer visits and delivery cycles against greenhouse gas emissions, the new system would reduce the company’s carbon footprint.
New guided sales processes increase sales productivity by 13%
To enable sales to better serve customers, Frucor Suntory underwent a complete digital transformation to the cloud with SAP S/4HANA Cloud and developed MySH (My Sales Hub), a native IoS solution for the Apple devices powered by the Frucor Suntory sales team are used.
Bourne Digital, an Australian digital agency and SAP and Apple Enterprise partner with a focus on human-centered design, was chosen by Frucor Suntory to help them build, implement and support the My Sales Hub initiative.
“Bourne Digital partnered with Frucor Suntory to apply design thinking to reimagine the field sales journey,” explains Selim Ahmed, CEO and Founder of Bourne Digital. “SAP BTP then delivered the foundational capabilities, including security, mobile platform and integration, to bring the new sales journey to life.”
Design Thinking encourages people to collaborate and have conversations that fuel each other’s creativity, culminating in the best work.
Built on the seamless SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), MySH provides guided sales processes using consolidated data from Frucor Suntory’s on-premises and cloud back-end systems, ensuring sales has the right data at the right time. Sales meetings on MySH are run more efficiently for the best customer experience and as a result, sales productivity has increased by 13%.
“The role SAP BTP played was the glue to bring all our systems together with a great user experience,” said Barbara Ciancio, head of digital IT solutions at Frucor Suntory. “It gives us the ability to present real-time smarts from SAP to our sales team in a seamless and meaningful way while we are in market.”
With SAP BTP, applications can leverage generative AI capabilities that improve the developer experience and streamline integrations. AI services improve process automation, analytics and holistic planning, and simplify administrative tasks.
3% increase in sales revenue thanks to the MySH recommendation engine
MySH is specifically aimed at empowering local sales teams with customer-specific data to make the right conversations in real-time with a guided sales process, synchronized communications across the field and a recommendation engine to increase sales.
The unified mobile app allows the sales team to deliver the best experience to a wide range of customers in New Zealand and Australia. Visibility is improved, customer recommendations are intuitive, processes are standardized, e-learning modules drive growth and sales reporting is holistic.
“The tool (MySH) now includes a number of brilliant features that give us (Frucor Suntory Sales Team) the ability to have richer conversations with our retail partners,” said Scott McIver, Sales Field Manager at Frucor Suntory. “The order starter and suggested orders are game changers for us. These give us time to focus on increasing sales. It has already had a huge impact on sales for me and my team.”
And as a result of smart selling features (suggested items from the recommendation engine), there has been an increase in the number of cases sold, equating to a 3% increase in sales revenue.
The next time you’re in Australasia drinking your favorite drink with your Kiwi or Aussie friends, chances are you’ll be enjoying a Suntory Oceania brand. Kanpai!
Frucor Suntory is a finalist of the SAP 10th Anniversary Innovation Awards 2023 in the food and beverage category. Download the pitch deck to learn more about implementing the MySH iOS app.
