Asia’s largest direct marketer partners with Quinnox to deploy SAP technologies for bottom-line benefits

CLIENT OVERVIEW

One of the pioneers in water and air purification systems, vacuum cleaners and security systems gets the results they need from their SAP investment.

BUSINESS NEED

Direct marketer relies on SAP for big improvements, but is faced with big challenges.

With a wide variety of products and a large sales team touching over 1.5 million homes in the surging direct sales market in Asia, this global leader turned to SAP to simplify its complex business model and improve customer service and support levels. In addition, they looked to SAP technologies to improve warehouse management and other mission-critical business processes.

However, their investment in SAP fell short of their expectation due to an unreliable and inexperienced IT partner, particularly in the area of application management services (AMS). This resulted in poor quality support services, a six-month backlog of over 300 open tickets, poor documentation, and an unstable SAP environment due to patches, hot packs, and service packs not being released on time. Root causes were not addressed either, leading to recurring problems in the areas of order management, service management and marketing activities.

Other key shortfalls included third-party vendor performance measurement, accurate report generation, slow “concept to market” cycles for new products, errors in employee incentive calculations, little call center automation, and lack of dealer visibility. In addition, a lack of spare stock control resulted in a direct loss of royalty revenue. In fact, all these deficits – plus the failure to successfully implement SAP modules such as Warehouse Management, cProjects and Project Systems – resulted in operational inefficiencies that negatively impacted revenues and business growth overall.

SOLUTION

A holistic enterprise-wide strategy executed by an expert SAP.

Knowing that their investment in SAP was being squandered by an incumbent IT partner that hadn’t met their service level agreements in over a year due to a lack of governance, compliance and service reporting, they looked to the dependable SAP experts at Quinnox to quickly address these company-wide issues and major weaknesses.

A Quinnox AMS team specializing in SAP was quickly mobilized. Within 48 hours, they had identified key issues, analyzed available resources, and created a comprehensive plan that addressed and solved current challenges. A number of SAP products and other technologies – both existing and new – were designed into the plan to ensure all the needed areas were covered, from systems administration to security to support and more.

Application development projects were successfully launched and executed to improve partner management, including the automation of incentive calculations. All the previous investments in SAP modules were successfully implemented (Warehouse Management, cProjects, Project Systems). In addition, in order to effectively address critical customer complaint resolution, the Quinnox team successfully rolled out a call center automation solution using an interactive Voice Response (IVR) system.

An associate management system portal for dealer and distributor management was also created for measuring efficiencies and pinpointing issues. Analytical tools and other functionalities were specifically designed to reduce consistent and costly revenue leakage. Features included automated and enhanced information flow, better inventory management, clear visibility of secondary and tertiary sales, and accurate performance metrics through intuitive dashboard reports.

BENEFITS

The results were better customer service, greater productivity, reduced order entry time, increased visibility, and more accurate performance reporting, among other benefits.

In all, twelve business-critical projects were delivered, including significant achievements in the areas of Web sales, spare barcoding, a vendor portal, central warehousing improvements, new initiatives, traceability, auto MIRO, and more. All these tasks and deliverables were executed quickly and cost-effectively, using a delivery model with a 15/85 ratio of onsite-to-offshore resources.