Everyone knows Ben & Jerry's, the decidedly "uncorporate" purveyor of delicious super-premium ice creams. In addition, Ben & Jerry's has carved out a unique niche with its campaigns on behalf of global peace and rain forest preservation, fundraising efforts for the homeless, and its commitment to using local and alternative suppliers.
So of course one might suspect that warm and fuzzy Ben & Jerry's would be the last company to employ cutting-edge field force automation software running on Handheld PCs in an effort to better understand its markets and more efficiently distribute its products.
Guess again.
Anxious to collect market data in real time, this past summer Ben & Jerry's conducted a one-month trial. According to Melissa Loomis, national merchandising manager at Ben & Jerry's, they used the MSP line of mobile enterprise applications from Thinque Systems of Universal City, CA (www.thinque.com), running on the NEC MobilePro 790. Based on the positive results, Loomis is training her entire staff for a nationwide rollout beginning in January 2003.
Ben & Jerry's also wanted to improve customer loyalty and enhance its ability to limit out-of-stock situations. According to Loomis, the trial delivered these benefits and more. "Now we can deconstruct a market within a week, and then analyze the gap in distribution," Loomis said. "We were working on paper before. Data collection was difficult, but the analysis was even more time-consuming, as it often took days. With the Thinque solution, I have analysis in 24 hours."
The initial trial was conducted in southern California, where Loomis equipped four employees with Handheld PCs loaded with Thinque's MSP package for Field Data Collection. Loomis wanted to know if the Handheld PC solution could outperform Ben & Jerry's previous methodology for evaluating POS displays, in-stock conditions, distributor compliance, pricing, and promotion execution at the retail level. Loomis's team fanned out to survey Ben & Jerry's retail partners in the Los Angeles, South Bay, Orange, and Riverside regions.
From the opening screen of their field data application, Ben & Jerry's personnel can initiate communications/synchronization with the home office, view calls and complete them, and view site and contact information.
Simultaneously, Loomis sent a team out to North Carolina to gather data the old fashioned way--paper and pen. The southern California team visited more than 100 stores in one week. Because the Thinque software allows data to be updated overnight via a synchronization process, Loomis was able to analyze market trends on a daily basis.
In contrast, the North Carolina team could only collect data at 76 stores during the same time period. It took more than two days to analyze that data.
"The ROI analysis is clear," Loomis said. "We were able to gather information in real time versus conventional data collection. We can alter shelf conditions and reduce out of stock occurrences."
Ensuring that product is on the shelf and is displayed properly would likely generate a convincing business case for most corporations. And while the numbers are clearly important to Loomis, it's also clear that Ben & Jerry's considers a positive customer experience to be just as important.
"Ben & Jerry's is a very desirable brand," Loomis said. "This is a way that we can meet our customers' needs. We want our customers to find what they came to the retailer for. Sometimes time is more important than money. Customer loyalty will be improved and no longer at risk."
In deciding to move to full deployment, Loomis carefully evaluated both Thinque's and NEC's performance. Loomis was pleased by both products.
"Thinque's flexibility is key," Loomis said. "You can customize the product so that a form can be created for secret shoppers or for a specific promotion."
"We built applications, grids, reports--it was all very simple," Loomis said. Web-based reports also proved to be a very useful feature for Ben & Jerry's.
Data downloads and back-end systems performed as expected.
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