Customers

PepsiAmericas

"The integration between Business Objects and PeopleSoft via Business Objects' Data Quality Link for PeopleSoft was a key factor in our selection process."

David Van Volkenburg
IT applications manager
PepsiAmericas

Mergers, Acquisitions and Disparate Computer Systems

The new PepsiAmericas was formed in early 2001 when Whitman Corporation, the holding company for Pepsi-Cola General Bottlers, acquired the former PepsiAmericas and then took on its name, creating an industry powerhouse with revenues of more than $3 billion. Prior to the merger, the former PepsiAmericas was the third largest anchor bottler in the PepsiCo system, formed in 1999 through a roll-up of Dakota Beverage Company, Delta Beverage Group and Pepsi-Cola Puerto Rico Bottling Company.

The result of this extensive M&A activity was not only the creation of a formidable market force, but also a company with a large number of disparate enterprise computer systems that made business consolidation extremely difficult. While Pepsi-Cola General Bottlers used PeopleSoft as their back office solution for accounts receivable and accounts payable, etc., it used a homegrown mainframe solution for storing its master customer files. In addition, while the former PepsiAmericas had also standardized on PeopleSoft, it was still consolidating systems from its 1999 roll-up - the Dakota territories were running homegrown IBM AS/400 applications and the Delta territories ran the Descartes logistics management system. The task facing PepsiAmerica's IT organization to bring together all of this crucial disparate data was enormous.

Separating Sales and Distribution Functions

But there's more. PepsiAmericas was also changing its "go to market" plan, separating out its sales and distribution functions to improve sales and optimize its distribution system. In its previous sales model, representatives were responsible for making the next sale to an account as well as handling deliveries. "Our prior environment was very static," said David Van Volkenburg, PepsiAmericas manager, IT applications. "We would deliver to the same businesses on the same day, regardless of order content. We wanted to take both our sales and distribution channels to the next level and we needed a higher quality and more robust database to enable that to happen."

According to Van Volkenburg, PepsiAmericas wanted to change the way PepsiAmericas "viewed" its customers. "We previously had a flat, very shallow customer database," Van Volkenburg explained. "This really didn't give us a good overall picture of our customers. The focus was on the vending machines and distribution points, which made effective cross-selling and up-selling nearly impossible."

Previously, PepsiAmericas might have had five different vending machines within a particular hotel location broken out as individual customers even though they were located at the same physical address. For example, the hotel might have a restaurant, hotel shop and snack bar that need to be serviced as well as individual vending machines.

To help with the massive task of data cleansing and consolidation, PepsiAmericas began the search for a data quality solution that could integrate into its PeopleSoft 7.53 environment, which feeds a 400 Gigabyte Oracle 8i database running on a 32-processor Hewlett Packard Unix server. After extensive due diligence, PepsiAmericas selected Business Objects's Information Quality Suite.

"The integration between Business Objects and PeopleSoft via Business Objects's Data Quality Link for PeopleSoft was a key factor in our selection process," Van Volkenburg said. "As it turns out, we are using the product as much, if not more, outside our PeopleSoft environment as we continue to transition legacy systems and acquire new data sources."

PepsiAmericas is in the process of completing the successful rollout of its new environment, consisting of a computer telephony integration (CTI)-based call center dedicated to cross-selling and up-selling to its smaller accounts, with Account Sales managers still dedicated to personally handling the company's larger accounts. Deliveries are now handled separately.

"In our previous environment, we wanted our data to be good, but it wasn't the end of the world if it wasn't perfect," Van Volkenburg said. "But in our new environment, we need accurate contact information for our call center as well as address information to help us optimize our delivery routes. In addition, we needed to provide a more complete, single view of our customers to our new sales organization so they could be more effective selling our wide range of products."

To accomplish this, PepsiAmericas used Business Objects's Information Quality Suite to identify and consolidate the multiple distribution points within a particular address, enabling them to roll- up a single view of the customer. "Anytime we are doing a conversion or integration of business unit data, we use the batch feature of IQ Suite to scrub and standardize names and addresses as well as consolidate multiple rows of the same data," said Gina Donald, a programmer/analyst who works closely with the BUsiness Objects solution.

On Target Deliveries

The newly cleansed and consolidated data has enabled PepsiAmericas to not only increase its targeted sales opportunities, but also optimize its daily delivery routes based on orders taken the previous day. Using Business Objects' IQ Suite, PepsiAmericas not only cleanses and consolidates the data, but also generates nearly 100 percent accurate latitude and longitude code, which Business Objects refers to as geocodes. According to Van Volkenburg, accurate geocoding is key to PepsiAmericas' routing solution being effective. "We send our orders through a custom routing solution to provide exact coordinates for each delivery location," he said. "We need to have the proper geocode or the routing process ends up becoming very labor intensive."

PepsiAmericas has also been impressed with the reporting capabilities in Business Objects' IQ Suite. "Each batch process report details the information contained in the log, giving you a pretty good indication of the quality of the data," Donald said. "Depending on the source of the data, we found that valid addresses were only in the 70 percent range, so it really helped open our eyes to data quality issues. It also helped us identify within our data warehouse environment that there is a big issue with manual manipulations of their customer database."

Added Van Volkenburg, "We originally purchased Business Objects' IQ Suite to use in our PeopleSoft environment. But it has helped us in so many ways, from data cleansing and consolidation to building a new powerful, single view of our customers. It has been a welcome addition to our entire enterprise IT infrastructure."

About

PepsiAmericas, Inc. (NYSE: PAS) is the number-two anchor bottler in the Pepsi system with operations in 18 states as well as Puerto Rico, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Republic of Slovakia. In total, the company serves a population of more than 117 million people. PepsiAmericas manufactures, distributes and markets a broad portfolio of Pepsi-Cola and other national and regional beverage brands. PepsiCo, Inc. (NYSE: PEP) holds a 37.3 percent equity interest in PepsiAmericas.

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