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We trade in something like 180 countries,
which is possibly 97% of the global population.
And it's no longer just the Wrigley Chewing Gum Company.
In the last three or four years, we've been expanding by both acquisition
and research and developments into other confectionary categories.
We had to get a handle on the spend and understand
which kind of trade events worked, which didn't,
how much return on the investment we were really seeing
to make sure we weren't just blindly throwing money at the retailers,
which was probably not good for them and certainly not good for us longer term.
We launched a global program to implement SAP R3 systems and BW globally.
We made a key decision that it would be a single instance.
It's been very, very powerful for us.
To give you a real example, when we acquired the brands from Kraft, Altoids
and Lifesavers, we were able to within 70 days of closing the deal
be fully invoicing, shipping, and distributing their products through our system,
we were able to slam dunk through Kraft business lines straight into our system,
which is huge. And because we continue to acquire, that's going to be something
we do over and over again and continue to derive benefit from.
We've started to implement tools such as CRM,
the trade promotions management components of that;
doing a lot of work with analytics, Web enabling,
BW reporting, and SCM planning capabilities, rendering it for the web
so it's easy to use for sales guys and for the marketing people.
We set about really seeing if we could develop some simple-to-use analytics
for the commercial organization. These are busy people.
They're sales guys; they want to be selling.
They don't want to be data-mining or drilling down through BW reports.
They wanted to know simply and quickly and clearly where they are.
If there's a problem, they needed to know; if they’re good to go,
if it’s okay, that's great and that's enough.
Because the way the dashboards are designed,
they bring together huge amounts of information concurrently
and render it as graphs and key performance indicators and measures.
The feedback we got from business people is to get the same level of information,
they’d have to run multiple reports and spend a great deal of time
and then putting all of that together into Excel.
And then they've got to repeat every time, every day.
So that's just time; it's just efficiency savings; just saving busy people time.
That's obviously been key.
Also, the other huge benefit is having a single global system;
we can do some incredibly powerful analytics
and number crunching and number analysis; we can literally take sales
from our global product brands worldwide and analyze them up to a global level.
We can analyze global key accounts and how they're performing across borders.
It’s been very powerful for us.
The value in the tool is the ongoing learning. From the first year, people learn to plan,
they start to get the disciplines, they start to think how to think analytically.
They learn how to plan and to execute and how to collaborate.
Each year, each planning cycle the knowledge capital grows; people's skills grow;
we become better planners; we get to drive return investment even harder.
Certainly in the future once people are used to planning and executing,
we could just start setting performance targets, profitability targets,
and then driving the business forward for the benefit of the customer
of course and for the Wrigley Company also.