Ireland: Heineken implements mobile reporting system for improving beer quality

Heineken has implemented a mobile reporting system for its engineers in Ireland, as part of a drive to improve the quality of beer served, Computerweekly reported June 11.

The engineers service more than 8,000 pubs, hotels and restaurants. Using the AMPower system from Antenna Software on Blackberry PDAs, servicing information on beer pipes at these outlets can be automatically updated to the Siebel CRM system. This enables Heineken account managers to monitor the maintenance of lines - and well maintained lines mean tastier beer.

The brewer schedules 24,000 pipe cleans every month.

It previously used a Siebel CRM system to ensure that all lines were cleaned on schedule and to provide engineers with the latest information to carry out maintenance checks.

Before the current system was installed, however, all of the communication was carried out by post/fax/and over the phone, with lots of printing out of information from Siebel, and lots of keying in of results arriving, which was error prone.

This made it difficult to manage and measure performance to service level agreements (SLA) until late after servicing had been carried, and when talking to a customer, account reps could not give accurate info regarding when the engineer last called or was scheduled to call again.

Now with information coming in on the day maintenance has been performed, the brewery gets much faster visibility into the progress of work against SLAs.

"It could take from 2-10 days for the system to be updated," said Martin Gowran, IT Project Manager, Heineken Ireland. "If an engineer was posted out a five day schedule of work to follow, the update on the first day's work could take up to nine days to reach our head office. Now the rep updates his AMPower system on his Blackberry the same day as he completes the work and the information is usually updated on the Siebel system within 2-3 seconds," he said.

"But by providing each rep with a Blackberry plus removing paperwork from their daily routine they had a good incentive, as previously they had no business e-mail address."

By 2010, Gartner predicts that the challenge in customer relationship management strategies will move from giving customer-facing employees better tools to putting the tools directly in the hands of customers - so that clients can access service data directly and through a variety of means, including mobile.

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