Frucor Suntory’s SAP Innovation Journey – Innovation Evangelism

Frucor Suntory, a leading Australasian drinks company, has embarked on an innovative journey to enhance its sales processes and customer experience, and has written about the experience in their entry for the 2023 SAP Innovation Awards. By leveraging the power of SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), Frucor Suntory revolutionized its sales automation system, empowering its sales team to deliver exceptional customer service.

Here’s a quick summary of that document, exploring the challenges faced by Frucor Suntory, the solution implemented using SAP BTP, and the remarkable outcomes achieved.

Company Overview: Frucor Suntory, headquartered in Auckland, New Zealand, is a renowned player in the food and beverage industry. With a rich history dating back to the 1960s — starting with juice created from apples that weren’t suitable for export — the company has evolved into an international beverages company, producing over 30 million cases of drinks annually. Frucor Suntory offers a diverse range of products, including fruit juices, energy drinks, soft drinks, and more. As a subsidiary of the esteemed Suntory Group, the company is committed to delivering excellence in the market.

Challenges Faced: Frucor Suntory’s sales team was burdened with an outdated, on-premise sales automation system that hindered their efficiency. Information was scattered across multiple tabs and tools, resulting in slow and siloed processes. Inefficient sales meetings, inconsistent user approaches, and fractured CRM data impacted both customer and user experiences. Frucor Suntory recognized the need for a transformative solution that would leverage their SAP investment to overcome these challenges.

Solution Implemented: Driven by their commitment to innovation, and assisted by SAP Partner Bourne Digital, Frucor Suntory embraced SAP S/4HANA as part of their business transformation journey. But the organization knew that just upgrading their system to the cloud wouldn’t be enough, and wouldn’t help all the challenges facing their staff. So to maximize their SAP investment, they developed “My Sales Hub” (MySH for short, pronounced “Meesh,” and given a robot avatar personality!) on SAP BTP—a seamless platform consolidating data from both on-premise and cloud systems. MySH, an iOS-based field sales tool, empowered the sales team with standardized user processes, comprehensive sales visibility, and improved customer recommendations. By utilizing SAP BTP, Frucor Suntory revolutionized their sales processes, ensuring the best customer experiences across Australia and New Zealand.

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Outcomes and Benefits: The feedback from the users and managers has been exemplary:

“[MySH] now encompasses some brilliant features which gives us [the Frucor Suntory Sales Team] the ability to have richer conversations with our retail partners. The order starter and suggested orders are game changes for us. These allow us time to focus on growing sales. It’s already had a massive impact for sales for me and my team.” Scott McIver, Sales Field Manager, FrucorSuntory

The implementation of MySH brought remarkable outcomes and benefits for Frucor Suntory:

1. Increased Productivity: MySH streamlined the sales process, saving valuable sales call time and boosting productivity by 13%.
2. Revenue Growth: The sales team witnessed an increase in sales revenue through the implementation of MySH’s suggested items recommendation engine.
3. Standardized Processes: With MySH, Frucor Suntory achieved consistency in user processes and messaging, enhancing the customer experience.
4. Holistic Sales Reporting: MySH replaced four outdated sales tools, enabling comprehensive and accurate sales reporting.
5. Enhanced User Experience: The native iOS application of MySH, built using SAP BTP SDK for iOS, provided a fast and intuitive user experience for the sales team.

6. MySH reduces carbon footprint my optimizing sales rep daily customer visits and delivery cycles, as part of Fucor Suntory’s strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and implement sustainability targets by 2030.

Conclusion: Frucor Suntory’s partnership with SAP and their utilization of SAP BTP led to a transformative journey that empowered their sales team and enhanced the customer experience. By implementing MySH, Frucor Suntory consolidated their sales processes, standardized user approaches, and achieved remarkable revenue growth. The success of this project exemplifies the power of innovation and the value of SAP BTP in driving digital transformation for businesses across industries.

To learn more about Frucor Suntory’s real-world innovation journey and their partnership with SAP and Bourne Digital, listen to this excellent video from the SAP Experience Center in Singapore featuring an interview between Selim Ahmed of Bourne Digital and Barbara Ciancio of Frucor Suntory. It includes more views of the product in action, discusses how essential Design Thinking was for the process, talks about SAP BTP being the “glue” that enabled the team to bring different systems together, and reveals the other key lessons learned along the way.

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