When the Avon lady next comes calling, she's going to be supported by a global Cloud-based customer management and data warehousing initiative.
As Avon gears up to celebrate its 125th birthday this year, ICT is at the very heart of the company's ambitious growth plans. “Our CEO believes that we have entered a new era for ICT at Avon,” says Peter Winter, VP of Enterprise Data Management and Information Delivery. “We see IT as a growth driver, not something limited to productivity and efficiency. We have a growth strategy to double in revenue. Technology initiatives are seen as significant portion of what will double our business over the next five years.”
As an $11 business operating across 100 countries, Avon is a direct selling company that operates through a network of contractor representatives, mostly women. The number of reps in each geography varies – 1.5 million in Brazil, 600,000 in Russia and so on. The firm is also one of the largest publishers in the world, distributing over one billion product catalogues each year with a new print cycle every 2-3 weeks to update the most current promotions.
But it's the sales representatives at ground level who can most benefit from the application of customer information and campaign management systems. “We want to bring our reps online,” explains Winter. “Two years ago we had around 30% of our reps doing business online. That's now up to 50% and by 2012 we're targeting having 100% online. In many of the markets were we are biggest, such as Brazil, getting to that 100% is a big challenge.”
A major objective behind Avon's Cloud investment is to optimise campaign management. “At the moment if you are a sales leaders then after every campaign we are able to give you information on how you performed,” says Winter. “But a lot of the time what you find is what opportunities you missed and what you have to learn. We want to able to bring that information to the sales leaders every day in as close to real time as possible so that you can find the information to win during this campaign, not after the fact.
“We also want to equip our reps so that they can have their own websites,” he adds. “We're also now driving a world wide women's social network which is partially about doing business and partially about supporting women's groups around the world.”
The solution to all this is the Avon Leadership Manager (ALM) which had a simple concept on inception. “It's about visibility now, not later,” says Winter. “We wanted to provide tools that allow reps to act right now in all markets. We wanted to move from 'after the fact' realisation to 'known in advance'' about today's opportunities.”
Make up to the Cloud
Avon considered the idea of building its own solution in-house, but determined that it wouldn't be able to produce something with the necessary scalability and robustness. “We saw the Cloud as a huge advantage over internal development,” explains Winter. “We really needed to be able to scale up. We needed to get it done in a couple of years time so we needed speed of development. We needed multiple language flexibility and integrated collaboration functionality. And we we need future extensibility.”
ALM was build on Salesforce.com's Force.com platform with integration in to Avon's data warehouse. “We have spent ten years building out master data on an enterprise basis for Avon as a way of getting information moving on a global basis within our company,” says Winter.
After a 6 week prototyping exercise with Salesforce.com consultants, the initial pilot for ALM went live in Romania.The pilot had four specific KPIs to be analysed: group leadership sales, down line sales; down line order count and average leadership earnings. Sales in Romania saw a 10% increase during the pilot period.
The system is now live in 17 markets, including the UK, with the goal of being rolled out worldwide by 2012. There were some challenges to be overcome, such as some data loading issues early on and some concerns about personal data security, but these were rapidly overcome according to Winter. Avon also had an issue with what Winter refers to as “a very dynamic user base” which translates to a high turnover rate among sales reps. This demanded effective mechanisms to control subscription allocations. With this the subscription model would have become very costly.
The next step is to move to real time time data functionality. “We update data twice a day for most markets now, but we want to stream real time,” says Winter. There will also be more use of other functional areas of Salesforce.com's product set. “We're not using it for leads tracking or territory management and so on,” explains Winter. “But now we have an easy entry into those more traditional field sales areas. We're also going to take a good hard look at Chatter and see if we can integrate that.”
