Siebel upgrade takes Lion Nathan CRM into the field

When the time came to update its ageing CRM system and streamline its sales process, Lion Nathan once
again turned to CRM specialists Bright Blue to upgrade its Siebel solution...

Traded on the ASX, Sydney-based Lion Nathan is an Australasian alcoholic beverages company employing over 3000 staff in numerous locations across Australia and New Zealand.

The company’s brands are iconic in both countries and in Australia include Tooheys, Swan and XXX.
A long-term adopter of a ‘best-of-breed’ philosophy to its IT solutions, the company recently began work on upgrading its long serving Siebel CRM system. Lion Nathan CIO Darryl Warren explains.

”Changing business requirements necessitated us changing the solution,“ he says.
”We’re running on Siebel 6 in Australia, which is something, like, seven years old and it’s unsupportable. Plus, there are a whole lot of features and functionality which come out of the box with the later Siebel release, and it’s primarily features and functionality that we’re looking for.“

Warren says Siebel ‘touch points’ in Lion Nathan are in the company’s call centres and in-field with its sales team. ”Our customers and consumers interact with Siebel in terms of our 1800 numbers,“ he says. ”And our sales staff are using it infield to manage all their communications back to head office. We’ve had Siebel in the call centre in Australia for many years and that’s being upgraded to the latest version, so coinciding with that we’re putting Siebel in field in Australia as well.“

Although an upgrade to Siebel 8 in New Zealand already has sales staff there interacting directly with the Siebel installation at Lion Nathan head office, in Australia the existing system has to involve a third party to achieve the same result. ”The sales people in Australia currently have PDAs,“ Warren says, ”connected to an application from a company called 04 which is interfaced to Siebel.

All the tasks and activities and that sort of thing are still managed in Siebel but get pushed to 04. What we want to do is replace the 04 application with Siebel in-field. Basically, the new Siebel version has better support for remote workers and is more extensible generally.“

A partnership approach Explaining the decision to work with Bright Blue on the upgrade, Warren says, with its best-of-breed philosophy, Lion Nathan wants to build partnerships for the long term and he observes that there’s much to be said for the insights offered from a long term relationship, both in terms of Bright Blue’s understanding of how to best apply the Siebel product and its knowledge of the way Lion Nathan operates.
”Siebel CRM is a very complex product,“ he says.

”There are many ways of undertaking the same activity within the product and it’s a question of deciding which is the best way for your business to meet your ends. So, the fact that they’re reasonably intimate with our business means they’re able to align that with their knowledge of Siebel, to make suggestions as to how we might implement a particular facet.“

While he notes that an organisation such as Lion Nathan may feel it has become an expert in the use of an application, he says an implementation partner should always be able to provide a different perspective. ”Our expertise is only in the modules that we use,“ he says, ”as opposed to the full breadth of the product. Whereas Bright Blue have much more in-depth expertise. A much broader expertise. So there are choices about the ways you can do things and their input into making those choices is pretty significant.“

At Bright Blue, services manager Matthew Yoon says his company’s proactive approach to client requirements helps deliver a better ROI.

”Rather than sitting back in more of a traditional sense and going back to the business and asking all their business requirements,“ he says, ”we like to take the approach of showing them what Siebel can do first. So it’s coming from the angle of working with the business in how to leverage the Siebel application out of the box as much as possible. That way they can actually leverage the expertise provided by Siebel and us – as well as getting the most value and return on their investment with the least amount of configuring.“

Yoon admits however that it can be a horses for courses approach. ”It depends on the circumstances and the culture of the business,“ he says. ”With some businesses it’s very difficult to change their business processes, while others are more than happy to adopt new ways as long as it’s more efficient and effective.“
Warren says organisations need to give full credit to the history of experience and application of best practice that has gone into developing a CRM solution such as Siebel. ”Being prepared to map and fit your business processes to the application is very important,“ he says.

”By its inherent nature it will do things certain ways, so if there’s no reason not to do it the way the application does it out of the box then don’t reinvent it. Because if you take something like Siebel CRM, there is obviously a lot of best practice thinking that’s gone into it over the years, from many companies contributing to its development.“

Warren notes that a lot of the tools and processes that have gone into Siebel are based on direct customer feedback from earlier versions and implementations intended to improve the product. ”A lot of your decisions should be based around how the product wants to do it and making the most of that, as opposed to reinventing the wheel. That does not mean that you won’t have to configure, because you absolutely will, but what you want to do is avoid excessive configuration.“

Agility & flexibility the key

Warren says that in recent times, both in the case of the Siebel installation and other IT projects, Lion Nathan has decided to adopt an ”Agile“ project management philosophy.

”There are two methodologies of doing projects,“ he says. ”You can follow a methodology like PRINCE 2 (PRojects IN Controlled Environments – a project management methodology), where you develop formal business requirements and produce tons of documents or you can use Agile.“
He says an Agile approach has enabled Lion Nathan to create ‘use cases’.

”They allow you to create environments and you spend a lot of time working together in concert with the internal business partner and the vendor, and it’s almost like an iterative pilot environment, where you develop a pilot then add functionality to that. Overall, we’ve found Agile was a better methodology to use, as to a large degree it means you’re looking at the product ‘in action’ early on.“

Both Yoon and Warren say a best-of-breed philosophy supports this type of Agile approach, especially as a CRM solution must be able to evolve with changing business needs.

”That’s the benefit of taking a best-of-breed approach,“ says Warren.

”If you were using an ERP suite with a built-in CRM solution, then it’s quite likely that you would be ‘version locked’ on a particular version unless you upgraded the rest of your ERP suite solution. And that’s a fairly ugly thought when you look at it.“

Yoon says with several Siebel projects underway, Lion Nathan’s approach has the company well positioned for the future.

”I think earlier on in the Siebel journey that they’d have gone through Lion Nathan addressing immediate needs – ‘we need an order entry capability that integrates with our back-end system’ – that kind of immediate business need. Whereas with the upgrade they’re now in a position to be looking ahead and anticipating where the business should be heading. Essentially, they’ve positioned themselves with a platform that can meet whatever business need appears on the horizon. So, for example, if Lion Nathan wanted to extend Siebel to other users or business functions it has the platform to say, ‘Yes, we can do that – and we can do it quickly’. “