SSON’s Impact Awards are globally recognised, annual awards that honour and celebrate achievements across several different categories across four different regions in the world. Applications are evaluated by a judging panel made up of leading practitioners selected for their experience and are exemplary members of the services delivery community.

Here we share an edited version of Asahi Beverages’ winning application for the Customer Centricity Impact award in Australia.

About Asahi And their SSO

Asahi beverages is one of the leading beverage companies in Australia and New Zealand. They comprise some of the most successful beverage businesses, including Asahi Lifestyle Beverages, Asahi Beverages New Zealand and Carlton & United Breweries (CUB), and markets quality alcohol and non-alcohol beverages, boasting a strong portfolio of established household brands and innovative, new-to-market products.

Asahi Beverages established their Shared Services Organisation (SSO) in 2014, and has grown to comprise of over 400 FTEs in the last seven years, which contains a broad range of capabilities including Finance and Procurement Services, but also extends to Customer and Commercial Services, HR Services, Supply Chain Services, etc.

Since beginning their automation journey in 2018, Asahi now have more than 100 RPA ‘bots’ In operation, and have dedicated service transition and process optimisation teams to seek-out opportunities to streamline the overall operating model for the organisation and optimise business processes.

Objectives

Asahi has a culture of seeking to identify gaps in performance and user experience in order to identify the root causes, and put sustainable and corrective actions into place to rectify this. After gaining feedback through Internal Engagement Surveys, External and Internal Workshops, and through Advantage Group Industry Surveys, there were two consistent themes that came through:

• Customers needed Asahi to be easier to do business with.
• The wider CUB team needed to do less business with itself.

These aligned with Asahi’s strategic pillar of ‘Delighting Customers’, which then resulted in the ‘Easy To Do Business’ model established for the SSO team, enabling them to lead a cross-functional group which aimed to optimise end-to-end processes.

In regards to Asahi’s ‘SSO Commercial Services Tower’, the feedback focused on 4 key areas of opportunity, and, based on these customer expectations, Asahi aimed to achieve the following:

1. To reduce the time it takes to set-up new customer accounts from 17 days to less than 5 days.
2. To reduce the time to approve and process credits from 28 days to less than 10 days.
3. To set-up the ‘Right First Time’ customer agreements from 66% to more than 90%.

By uncovering the root causes preventing Asahi from achieving their customer expectations and implementing an action plan for the long-term, this did not only improve their customer’s experience overall, but also reduced the time taken internally to complete these processes, enabling this time to be reinvested into value-adding activities with their customers.

Benefits And Improvements

Each business problem was addressed by Asahi via an independent assessment / root cause analysis. These consisted of:

1. New and improved account set-up time: The project was tasked with reviewing all aspects of the process itself to identify potential opportunities to streamline. It involved a thorough root cause analysis of the various components of the process which were causing setup delays, and thus identifying relevant solutions and implementing them into the business model.
2. Time taken to receive credit notes: A set of reports were established to better understand why and where the delays were occurring. Of the 28 days it took to process the credit notes, the SSO team took less than a day to do so. Whereas the amount of time taken for Sales to lodge the request was more than 27 days on average. Through planning, communication and process improvements, the average process time decreased to less than 9 days on average.
3. Customer contract first pass yield: There were a number of requests for Asahi’s SSO team to rework their methods due to incorrect processing. At its core, the reason was a misunderstanding of request intent, with the process clarity being inadequate. Asahi established a capability program to coach the sales team on the simplest navigations for various request types.

What was the impact?

Results across the four areas exceeded customer expectations in all insances, and can be considered as a new benchmark. 

1. New Account setup time: Now, 96.7% of customer accounts are fully setup within 1 business day, as opposed to the previous 17 days. 
2. Time to receive credit notes: Now, 93.2% of credit notes are processed to customer accounts within 9 buisness days, as opposed to the previous 28 days. 
3. Customer contract first passes yield: Now, 99.4% of customer contracts are correctly processed in the first instance. This is a significant improvement on the 66% prior to the implementation. 

By implementing these practices, Asahi have learnt to utilise data rather than gut feeling to make decisions. Where they assumed the areas that needed improving, the data confirmed parts of them but also highlighted additional problem areas that needed addressing. 

Asahi are now open to a multiple layer solution. By implementing a combination of structure change, process re-engineering, and automation, they were able to achieve their desired results. 

Asahi's Easy To Do Business Program focused on investigating and understanding through utilising a suite of Lean Six Sigma tools and techniques, allowing the data to guide the direction they will take rather than relying on personal viewpoints and subjective hypothesis to direct efforts.  

Don't forget to apply for the 2021 upcoming Awards here! Note: North American Awards application deadline is July 30th!