Global vision: How Orion is leading the consumer goods cloud revolution

A Global Vision: Orion and EG Set a New Standard for the Consumer Goods Cloud

Global consumer electronics giant EG faced a series of unexpected challenges to its US market share. To address them, they turned to a pioneer of the consumer goods cloud, Salesforce consultancy Orion Global Solutions. The result was across-the-board innovation in revenue operations, as well as a transformational technology strategy that will impact EG's business for years to come. Along the way, the project teams at Orion and EG gained a deep appreciation for EG's customers, its workers, and one another.

CLIENT NAME

INDUSTRY

Consumer Goods

PROJECT LENGTH

Over a year

TEAM SIZE

TECHNOLOGIES

EG Culture

In a word: teamwork. EG places a very high priority on building teams of smart innovative people that work together as a group. In that spirit, Orion is proud it was able to integrate its team so well with the remarkable team from EG.

Why Now

EG had store sales and related problems it couldn't solve by just hiring more people. Or even by making better products - they were aware that the relevant technical infrastructure was failing to the point of being partly unusable.

Other Things to Note

This story is about a project that will become phase 1 of a multi-year engagement. Because that phase went well for both teams, they continue to work together. For that reason, Orion doesn't reveal "EG's" actual name in this story.

The Project

[Author's note: in honor of an NDA with the client, EG is a psuedonym as are the names of EG employees in this story]

EG products are marketed in almost every country worldwide. Their devices and appliances reflect the rapid changes in how millions live their lives. As the CEO of EG, North America has said: "EG innovates products that customers never knew they needed".

This approach had long served EG well but in the largest market, the US, EG had lost momentum towards the end of the 2010's. Competition from rivals like Samsung and new entrants like TCL were pressuring EG market share. Product lines like flat-screen TVs had begun to falter. Then the pandemic undercut sales of EG smartphones and other handheld devices. But that wasn't all.

The Big Problem

The bigger problem had its root in technology strategy. This became clear after a round of meetings with two senior executives at EG - Bob Lee, CSO for EG North America, and Deborah Bauman, GM of Sales Operations North America. As both Deborah and Bob hinted at, a veil of uncertainty had descended over the company.

EG had begun to struggle to answer questions it was used to mastering:

How can we verify that our products are on the store shelves they're supposed to be on?
Retail CX - how do customers actually look at, touch, hold, and choose an EG device or appliance in the store?
Can we ensure (and measure) that store workers can explain EG product benefits to shoppers?
How is the way that customer shop for EG products changing?
How can EG work with stores and retail execution agencies to get the "sell-through" data EG executives need to make decisions?

Not being able to answer questions like these was a problem for EG, as it values listening to and understanding customers.

The Investigation

The Orion team considered these issues, comparing them with their own experience with similar clients (Panasonic, Toshiba, etc). Further probing led by Orion's Dan Farrugia uncovered specific issues in the Eastern US region alone, such as:

More than a hundred field service reps capturing daily activity in completely disconnected systems
An expensive voice/video/text communication solution only partially used, and poorly integrated with the rest of EG's sales operations tech stack
The people managing "retail execution" operations not knowing what staff was doing during the day - or even where they were, from among 100s of possible retail locations
Managers with almost no visibility into metrics being collected from staff members from in-store visits and from meetings with store representatives
Store performance and product "sell-through" information collected from some retail chains and not others, from some stores and not others, and in wildly incompatible data formats

Problems like these made Orion's unique expertise in cloud technology and consumer goods attractive to EG. Led by CRM pioneer Yacov Wrocherinsky and senior consultant Dan Farrugia, Orion designed and executed a transition to the consumer goods cloud that would address every single one of these issues and many more.

Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud (SCGC)

Specifically, this meant designing an implementation of Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud. Orion was well equipped for this - we'd had provided product design guidance on SCGC to Salesforce product managers; we knew the technology intimately. SCGC served as a foundation allowed for many optimizations and innovations for EG. Among them:

Better tracking of daily activities on mobile devices, so retail execution staffers in-store "retail execution" activities were better understood
A new approach to "planograms" allowing interactive and dynamic cloud-based store mapping (we call them "cloud planograms")
Consolidating hundreds of reports and tools off of Excel and local computers to the cloud, using both OOB Salesforce solutions and custom-built solutions

But Orion took EG deeper than improvements to daily logistics execution.

Firstly it, it helped integrate call-center software Bright Pattern with EG's new consumer goods cloud. It also helped them transition off older legacy tools like SPOT out of the EG tech stack.

Getting Re-Acquainted With the Customer

More importantly, Orion helped EG with the big picture: getting back in touch with the customer. It did this partly by using Einstein Analytics and Tableau CRM to evaluate retail behavior from 1000s of independent data sources - this has helped EG to make better real-time decisions and also to re-evaluate longer terms retail and product strategies.

Orion's work has already moved the needle for EG. It's also set the stage for an even deeper EG engagement, which will lean into Tableau and facilitate an full-ecosystem integration with one of the 'Big 3' cloud providers.

Striving For Positive Impact

Already, this project has revealed what the concept of consumer goods cloud can do - positively impact the working lives of thousands of employees and millions of consumers around the world. From there, it can help create impact in local communities around the world where a firm like LG does business.

Orion is grateful to EG for their partnership and for letting them show the world how the industry can evolve towards this new paradigm.

The Introduction Moment

When you make a point of always trying to do amazing work, people hear about it. Thus, EG knew Orion CEO Yacov Wrocherinsky by reputation long before they approached him. Yacov had led a well-known CRM implementation for Panasonic years before - along with similar projects. With that background, introductory conversations were fluid and expansive from the get-go. These talks included project lead Dan Farrugia, who led both pre-sales and post-sales efforts for Orion. They discussed Orion's typical approach to working with consumer goods manufacturers - and the "consumer goods cloud" as a new paradigm for that kind of business. During larger team introductions, that same spirit characterized the conversations: understanding the big picture concerns and contrasting them against the solution model that Orion specializes in. The Orion team knew from those early conversations that they were about to do some of the best work of their lives.

The Deal Clarity Moment

For this deal to work, there had to be clarity shared by more than 20 smart, critical decision makers. While Orion can't share the actual ecosystem architecture, we can say this about it: the design allows for dozens of datasources capturing inputs daily from 1000s of employees, 1000s of stores, and 10s of thousands of customers of EG's products. But at the center of everything was our "North Star" principle: centralize on Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud. This approach was carefully considered to ensure future-viability as well, which Orion was also able to clarify through visual representations. In short, the deal became clear when we could depict the 10-year lifespan of an enterprise ecosystem on 2 or 3 pieces of paper.

The Moment of Trust

One of the most important people to this project was a senior manager in charge of EG store sales operations in the Eastern US, Chris N. We'd interviewed Chris on the phone, relying heavily on his expertise to design our solution. Finally, we met him in person in our New York offices. The meeting lasted more than 2 hours. We walked him through our entire transformation plan in detail, from the excel migration to the newer advanced MAPS/Route planning system, to the mobile reporting system, and so on. Chris was impressed and easily understood everything we were doing. But the real moment of trust happened when he realized that at every opportunity, Orion deepy considered real human impact: "What will the impact of this solution be on the workers who actually use it day-to-day? Will it make their lives easier? Will they be happy?"

The Eureka Moment

We'd like to highlight a eureka moment on the client side. Orion assumed from Day 1 that a Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud implementation was in order. But in a complex enterprise ecosystem one platform is never the entire solution. There was a "Big 3" cloud platform to onboard, there was Bright Pattern, there was MAPS, there was a legacy datacenter full of SQL databases, and more. Like the tremors before the earthquake, small eureka moments foreshadow the big one. Finding a way to make each piece fit was a minor victory - as when both sides realized that a Salesforce Cloud could easily serve as the "source of truth" for NIP ("unexpected" not-in-plan data). That moment foreshadowed the real eureka moment, for EG: Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud would be the source of truth for EG's entire US revenue operations.

The Red Moment

It's one thing to get your client to adopt a new system and another to get a 3rd-party to do so. One of the toughest episodes in this engagement was telling an entire team of 100+ managers at MarketSource: 'You and your reports are using a new system now'. MarketSouce was the retail execution agency contracted by EG to actually visit stores and make sure that the product line was stocked, positioned, displayed, and priced according to agreement. There were some tough conversations here - and that helped us learn. Ultimately, we had to make sure that feedback from both managers and line-workers at MarketSource became part of the solution. This was crucial to our successful launch and we're grateful to the MarketSource team.

The Ribbon Cutting Moment

This was a beautiful moment but left us wanting more. Let me explain with a short anecdote/analogy from screenwriter Steven Pressfield (Legend of Bagger Vance, Above the Law) – after two years of painful struggle, Pressfield finally finished his first book. On that day he asked an elder, accomplished author what to do next. The elder author said, "Start writing your next book tomorrow." And while this wasn't our "first book", this was exactly how we felt. To be sure, we celebrated, we laughed, we high-fived – we thought we'd accomplished something impressive for a firm our size. We believe this quality of work is why Orion earned a 5/5 on the Salesforce partner survey. But the long-term results weren't in yet and there was more to be done. So on the next day, we got to work on Phase II.

The ROI Moment

Up above, we described the "Ribbon Cutting Moment" as the moment you pat yourself on the back but get back to work - that's because what the real cause for celebration is when there's proof of ROI. We reached that moment about 3 weeks after initial deployment – after refining some minor issues, the system was running smoothly and it was obvious to EG!! For a complex initiative like this, there are lots of different kinds of ROI: proof of adoption at all levels, proof of satisfaction, proof that all the pieces are working (MAPS, territories, metrics, integrations, and more), and ultimately positive financial ROI. We look forward to many more ROI moments for EG in the years to come.

"Working with Orion has been a blessing in every sense and I am frankly amazed at what they have achieved so far. I'll be honest, I was skeptical at first that a boutique firm like Orion could tackle the immensity of the problems we had. And honestly I am always skeptical of cloud transformation vendors . But their reputation in working with Panasonic and others like them was obviously well deserved. They are much more than a technology vendor, they are a strategy consultancy and there impact here has been huge - it's just made so many people's jobs easier, inside and outside of EG."

- Chris N. , Senior Manager of Store Operations

TEAM

Peter Breglio

Senior Business Analyst

Dan Farrugia

Senior Solution Architect

Yacov Wrocherinsky

Consulting Team Business Leader

Story By Brightr

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