Product Sales Price Extraction
Client portfolio
Our client is one of the largest liquor manufacturing companies in the United States of America, with a perfect blend of rich ancestral heritage and modern innovative flavor, working strenuously at finding the right balance between staying ahead of customers’ expectations and delivering quality experiences.
Overview – Origins
Bacardi, a leader in the liquor industry streamlined their price extraction process and reduced delivery time significantly, through automation. In the liquor industry as in with any consumer goods industry, the pricing of any product is not a static number. The price is influenced by a lot of factors like taxation, surcharges, delivery terms and payments, etc. Thereby, the same product may be priced differently to the same customer when shipped from different plants or on different dates or from different states/regions. The case study under examination explains the automation solution that simplifies the requirement of a consolidation of the pricing of different products to different customers at any given time.
Problem statement – The Past
Price Extraction process at Bacardi involving hours of processing time. The process of price extraction for Bacardi was ridden with delays, manual look ups and data extraction.
Data request from Master Data team. Whenever the Sales team required the latest pricing data, they would raise a request to the Master Data team. The team would have to collate a list of the materials (or products) and their respective customers (Sales Organization and Regions inclusive) for whom the pricing data is sought. Then they raised a ticket to the IT team who would then run the pricing tool with the supplied inputs to fetch the desired data from SAP system. This would then be shared in raw data format to the Master Data team who would cleanse it and populate the sought-after data in a readable pre-designed format, preferably an excel file. Then they send this excel file to the Sales team for use.
Timeline for processing of pricing data. The timelines from the day of raising the request by the Sales Team to the receipt of data is about 7-8 working days. Apart from the manual process, the pricing tool that fetches data from SAP itself consumes an average of average 6-7 hours. With higher volumes of data this time could extend to a maximum of even 40 hours.
Potential for automation. The above manual process of price request, extraction and search is ripe with potential for optimization. A hyperautomation platform like Tulip could help save precious time, resources and eliminate delays in Bacardi’s price extraction process and improve customer satisfaction.
Our Solution – The Present
An automation solution to reduce delays and deliver output on time To eliminate repetitive, time-consuming tasks and free resources, Bacardi partnered with BeezLabs to embark on a transformative journey of hyperautomation for price extraction.
The proposed solution would simply obtain an input that consisted of the list of customers for whom pricing data is requested. The output would be in the form of the same pre-designed excel sheet with the desired data.
In the automated solution delivered by BeezLabs, the first sequence dealt with the input process by the end user, either the Sales Team or the Master Data team as the case may be. The automation service would receive the input data and take care of anomalies. The subsequent sequence involves querying the SAP system based on the inputs received. This step involves massive volume of data that typically involves 6-7 hours of massive data processing which generates output data in raw form. The automated solution employs library functions to cleanse the data and populate the same in the pre-designed excel sheet. With the email ids already assigned to the automation service, the output excel sheet is emailed to the intended recipients of the Sales team. And voila! The Sales team have their data which they requested for in about just 6 hours.
The magic of automation through Tulip has saved Bacardi Sales teams hours of precious wait time and eliminated delays in satisfying customer requests.
Value delivered – The Outcome
Potential extended scope – The Future
Any sector which uses standardized sales and pricing data maintenance in SAP can be transformed to deliver data on time with an automation solution like Tulip. Huge volumes of data that take time to process and are ridden with delays are ideal candidates for being transformed through the power of hyperautomation.
