Case Studies - H.J. Heinz
Headquarters: Pittsburgh, PA
Sector: Consumer Packaged Goods
Function: Sales Channel Management
Solution: Paperless recording of store visit audits, immediate detailed
analytic reports
Benefits: Retail advantage through timely business intelligence, reduced effort
and cost of collecting and reporting
"It was relatively simple to match up everything the retail business managers did with a paper audit to an electronic format using Flowfinity Actions on BlackBerry devices. And when we added the reporting component so we could utilize the data collected from the audits, we knew we had something great."
- Eric Ginsburg, Foodservice Sales Information Manager, H.J. Heinz
Challenge
H. J. Heinz is a global, U.S.-based food company. The $10 billion Heinz brand is available in more than 50 countries. Among the responsibilities of Heinz’s U.S. Consumer Products division is how the company’s products are displayed on store shelves to most positively affect sales. This division manages third-party brokers who ensure products in stores meet criteria set to affect retail sales. Heinz needed to improve data collection and reporting from the store level, as well as speed up and improve the quality of scorecard information that was gathered about Heinz brands in retail stores. The existing paper-based system was slow, with considerable lag time between completing a store audit and reporting the findings to sales executives.
Solution
Heinz selected Flowfinity Actions, a packaged wireless application that blends business process automation with decision support to solve its business challenges by automating their audit processes. Flowfinity Actions software for BlackBerry helps automate how mobile workers exchange critical data with the enterprise and how their managers track and make decisions based on this data. The solution was further customized by Flowfinity, together with its system integration partner ATSG, by extending the basic reporting capabilities. A set of 22 flexible reports was designed to enable scorecard analysis from data collected with Flowfinity Actions. The resulting solution was customized and deployed within just six weeks.
The solution’s key features include:
- A manager-friendly interface for publishing custom audit forms
- User-friendly solution in the field
- New reporting database and reports Web site for scorecard information
Results
Heinz’s new solution enables its sales executives to make more informed decisions that build retail advantage. This is made possible through:
- More audits with better data collected
- Faster access to detailed reports
- Support for sales goals
- Ability to influence performance at store level
For more information
» Download In-Depth Case Study 
Video Case Study
