The Lawson Customer Relationship Management Solution Provides improved return on trade promotions and maximizes the efficacy of your sales organization
Are you making the most of your customer relationships? The Business Challenge The competitive environment for consumer goods manufacturers and brand owners is changing rapidly. Over the past decade, consumer goods companies have been caught between increasingly price-sensitive consumers and powerful retailers. Now even more pressure is being placed on these companies through the continued spread of private labels, increasingly discounted retailing and a shift in market power towards the consumer. To maintain competitive advantage, defend market position and secure brand values, many consumer goods manufacturers are increasingly focusing energy and resources on relationships with customers, consumers and retailers. Trade promotion effectiveness, improved sales execution, and joint value creation in brand and category activities with retailers are all sources of major potential gains. The bottom line is that customer relationship management (CRM) is becoming an essential part of consumer goods companies long-term strategies to keep their competitive advantages, streamline the sales process, defend their market position and secure brand values. With an effective CRM solution in place, you will generate additional sales and free up sales resources through improved return on trade promotion spending and maximized use of the sales organization.
Increase your customer focus through improved organization wide collaboration The Lawson Solution Lawson M3 Customer Relationship Management for FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) has been developed for consumer goods manufacturers and brand owners who want to enter the competitive retailer and consumer environment with excellence in marketing and sales execution. Unlike traditional solutions, the Lawson solution enables your entire organization to work as a team by connecting all departments sales, marketing, product and trade in one system. The solution supports the complete sales and trade promotion process, including planning, launching, executing and analyzing promotion and sales activities. Tight integration between all departments is a prerequisite for being able to manage this. This improved collaboration also allows these departments to work from the same plans, facts and figures, starting with the first planning stages through to execution. This minimizes today s often costly resource and prioritization conflicts that are not in line with the sales, customer and brand strategies. A collaborative solution also allows your company to close the gap between promotional planning and the sales representatives store execution reality. It offers support to sales representatives in their new role as category advisors and managers of the entire retailer relationship, including category management, customer plans and profitability-based brand activities. New accounts and the yearly negotiation processes with retail chains may involve many people both from the customer and from various departments in your organization. The opportunity management module supports your organization in the process and ensures that all appropriate actions are executed, from the initial offering through to the final implementation of new pricing and discounts. The payback is a more rapid process with fewer discrepancies between retailer agreements and invoiced prices, thus reducing the number of potential false invoices causing unnecessary deductions and claims.
Coordinate your sales efforts towards customers, retailers and wholesalers Solution Features at a Glance Account and category management Team-selling capabilities enable account managers to coordinate sales efforts directed toward customers, retailers and wholesalers. The solution allows for account-specific information regarding sales development, assortments, prices and category, and promotion plans to be shared among team members. Assortment management enables account managers to define store- and retailspecific assortments, together with additional space management recommendations. Assortment and store checks are centrally planned and automatically distributed to the sales representatives. Results can be analyzed immediately by both category and account managers. Opportunity management supports new accounts and the yearly negotiation process with customers and retailers.
Sales force effectiveness Lawson M3 Customer Relationship Management for FMCG provides a complete set of tools for sales representatives to manage their interaction with customers and stores in the best way possible through: Planning, executing and following up on customer- or store-specific activities Executing centrally-planned trade promotions and order proposals Managing direct orders and indirect orders through wholesalers Planning and following up on space management, assortment and category activities Managing and capturing claims and discounts at the store. The solution also: Provides sales representative with easy access to customer- and productspecific trade promotion and brand material Visualizes all sales cycle plans, objectives and planned store activities, thus enabling sales to proactively plan and optimize sales cycle activities Gives sales representatives the opportunity to work in both connected and disconnected modes through the use of an advanced synchronization engine. Trade promotion management The solution enables trade, category and account managers to plan their complete yearly promotion program well in advance for sales channels, retailer chains and brands respectively. For each promotion, selected target customer groups, associated products, promotion prices, and discounts and costs are managed. The solution enables the management of promotion budgets and targets using either fixed or variable costs. Promotion plans can be extracted at any time in Gantt charts to provide status information for each brand or retailer chain. This information can then be used for both internal and external discussions to optimize plans and avoid faulty prioritization. The solution links all promotion material and guideline documents with their respective promotions, thus creating one common repository of marketing material. This does away with a costly distribution process and ensures that promotions are executed with the right brand messages at all times.
Getting the Solution Up and Running Lawson M3 Customer Relationship Management for the FMCG industry enables you to perform the necessary business process analysis and make the changes needed to create a new, more effective sales process. Our CRM solution for FMCG is based on M3 Sales and Marketing Automation (SMS), a highly flexible, effective and easyto-use application that can easily be configured and implemented. Process analysis will ensure that the tool is set up and aligned according to your company s sales and marketing processes. The solution comes with a powerful replication engine that controls the replication of data between field-based clients and the central server. The types of data replicated between the server and clients are typically customer information updates, sales activities, orders, promotions, product information and documentation, and brand and sales materials. The replication process compresses (zips) the data before it is transferred between the server and the client, which reduces the amount of data that needs to be transferred. Lawson project managers and business consultants have many years of experi-ence implementing Lawson Food and Beverage industry solutions. Their experience gives Lawson unparalleled capabilities in terms of ensuring successful and secure project outcomes for our customers. Lawson provides: A client software license for Lawson Sales and Marketing Automation (SMS) for each user A server software license for Lawson SMS A standard integration package for version 12 of Lawson M3 Business Engine. For version 11 of Lawson M3 BE, Lawson can provide application programming interfaces (APIs). For older versions of Lawson M3 BE or for third-party ERP solutions, Lawson can provide open database connectivity (OD-DB) technology. A mutually agreed-upon implementation project including business process analysis, technical consulting, and training for your planners or key users. You provide: A powerful PC with Windows XP for each user A powerful server with Windows 2003 and Windows SQL server database Several days for orientation and training with your process owners, key users and IT personnel.
Immediate ROI through decreased costs and increased sales Immediate Return on Investment In most cases, our solution goes live within four months of project start-up. You will start to experience the benefits immediately. Your Lawson solution will offer enhanced opportunities for both increased sales and reduced costs, through: Improved customer targeting. Target profitable customers by improving your consumer environment, product assortments and brand strategy. Improved brand exposure. Gain better brand exposure by improving your retail compliance with agreed-upon assortments, space management formats and value-added activities. Improved utilization of sales representatives selling time. Make better use of your selling time by a higher degree of automation and improved deci-sion support. Improved return on trade promotion spending. Improve your return on trade promotion spending by synchronizing sales efforts through all channels and improving your use of value-added promotion activities. Reduced administration throughout the sales process. Reduce necessary administration of the sales process by automating processes, reducing the amount of incorrect information, and minimizing manual data entry in all types of support systems. Better control over given discounts. Gain better control of the complex network of trading partners in the consumer goods value chain by creating netpricing transparency. Reduced total costs for sales and marketing material. Reduce your total costs for publishing, printing and distributing sales and marketing materi-als by pooling marketing information in a common repository that links promotions to appropriate brand messages and automates material production.
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