Carlsberg Danmark Fixes Field Data Operations with BPM
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Field workers often create Excel spreadsheets to track data and run their processes. But what happens when there are dozens of these? Here’s how Carlsberg Danmark centralized business process management, created an orderly system with consistent data, and saved hundreds of hours in backoffice time.
You’ve heard this story before. If you’ve spent any length of time in your IT career, you’ve probably lived this story. Managers and sales reps in the field need to keep track of inventory, sales, product specs. So they create their own Excel spreadsheet or small database to do the job. Tens, maybe hundreds of these systems are created, emailed around the organization, and updated. None of them work together. None of them use common data. There is no centralized system.
This is a nightmare scenario for data management pros and IT workers. Yet it is how so many organizations have created data systems — through grass roots efforts when a need arose in the field.
Such systems, once created, quickly become production critical to those in the field, according to Kenneth Lindegaard, IT director at Carlsberg Danmark. He is one of the IT pros who has lived this story and he shared the details of his business transformation with InformationWeek in an interview. Lindegaard joined Carlsberg Danmark about four years ago from his role as an IBM business process management sales executive.
Carlsberg Danmark is the Danish market operation for the Carlsberg Group, probably best known to Americans for its beer. The organization distributes beers, sodas, waters, and similar items to restaurants and stores in Demark as the leading supplier of beer and soft drinks in that market.
Sales reps for the organization had a need to go in to visit customers — bar owners or retail store owners — and work with them to distribute products and displays. And they had created many systems over the years to track the information they needed while they were in the field. But multiple systems meant that these sales reps were wasting time with administrative tasks during customer visits instead of helping customers with promotional efforts or other value-added tasks.
What’s more, the systems themselves were running into issues. For instance, Carlsberg had some small Access-based databases used for storing campaign agreements and an old Sharepoint flow to deal with rebate payouts for customers. One Excel spreadsheet was integrated into a database and when you signed it, it generated a PDF file. Sales reps would have to go home, print out the file, and then drive it back to the customer to get it signed, Lindegaard said.
Another process for sales reps — ordering coolers that were placed in bars or supermarkets — required a worker in the back office to update and email to a list of 125 people in the field an Excel spreadsheet. This worker would update and send this spread sheet three times a day to provide current information about the stock and models available.
Carlsberg had done the work of “documenting processes across cross-functional areas, and built a Bible of process descriptions. But nobody’s looking at it,” Lindegaard said. “They weren’t maintained. They were really just sitting there.” Documenting the processes across functions did not solve the business process management issues at Carlsberg.
