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Procter & Gamble - Kaman

The Challenge

For FMCG company like Procter & Gamble, promotion campaigns are one of the most important instruments in Sales & Marketing activities of Key Account Managers. It is an investment, but correctly and sensitively applied they bring short-term as well as long-term benefits. In order to manage the process, people involved in planning, running and evaluation of campaigns need a tool providing access to all relevant data as well as supporting the whole process.

Our Solution

In fact, the project started “as usual”. We familiarized ourselves with the area and processes and in co-operation with client’s appointed IT project manager we proposed a new tool to be used by Key Account Managers in Czech and Slovak Republic. The system was designed to work in two parts - server part containing the master database and most of reporting and monitoring functions; and workstation part containing data relevant for the KAM’s work and functions enabling to do the planning and evaluation of the campaigns directly in the field when talking to the customer.

The complexity to the application and to the project management was added when number of participating countries began to rise. After successful rollout of the tool in the Czech and Slovak Republic, decision was taken to adopt it in the Central and Eastern Europe / Middle East region. This change has brought several new challenges into the project.

Besides the localization needs and differences in the processes that need to respond requirements of particular markets, also project tasks and schedules became new dimensions. Project co-ordination and processes were changed accordingly on-the-fly and new analytical tools were adopted. The technology did not change, however our company provided a new infrastructure in order to serve much more requests than before.

Nowadays the development advances at a fast pace. It is centrally coordinated and using all possible synergies, however still able to meet the requirements of the Key Account Managers working in very different markets from Turkey to Poland.

Applied Technology

The choice of the technology platform – especially in the case of the workstation part - was a particular question in the project, as it had to fulfill the requirement of ultimate guarantee of functionality in very different setups. Therefore MS Access was chosen. The server part uses multi-tier technology based on Oracle 8i database; application is developed in Java. Additionally, Crystal Reports are used for reporting functions.