For this Digital Transformation Project we collaborated with Red Bull, the market leader in selling energy drinks and a real marketing giant. I think everybody is quite familar with this multinational, but we will give a short introduction for those who are not.
Red Bull as we know it now was founded in 1987 by Dietrich Mateschitz from Austria. After discovering an energizing drink in Thailand, he decided to commercialize it and to introduce it in Austria and after that Europe. Nowadays his company is selling 5.612 billion cans a year in 167 different countries with 10 000 employees.
For this project we spoke to a sales representative of Red Bull Netherlands and tried to gain some insights into their Information Strategy and the way they make use of IT at the moment. Unfortunately we had to focus us on the department in which this sales representative works (The Field Sales Division) because it was difficult to talk to someone who is higher ranked within the organization.
During the interviews that we had with the sales representative we identified a problem with the current inventory system. The sales representatives of the kind that we spoke to are making use of small storage locations that are managed by one store location manager
and where products and promotion materials are stored. At this moment Red Bull didn’t use IT to follow and update stock levels that are visible to multiple people within the company. So the headquarters and the storage location manager doesn’t have any control, visibility and up to date insights about the stock that is stored at the location. This makes the ordering process inefficient and the system is very reliable of trust in employees.
To solve this problem we introduced a new inventory system that is build on IT applications. We recommended a system that is visible to the headquarters and the storage location manager via the cloud. The system works as follows: Every single time that one of the sales representatives pick their products and materials they have to scan the barcodes with an application on their iPad Mini (this is already present). With this manner, the sales representatives are able to update the stock in an easy way and the data about their pick ups will be uploaded into the central system which is visible to the headquarters and the storage location manager. It could be even possible to set an automatic reorder point, so the storage location manager doesn’t have to order anymore. With this system the issues about control and having no up to date insights about stock levels in this small storage locations would be solved with a few simple IT introductions.
The sales representative that we spoke to was very positive about this idea and the company might want to implement some of the features into their systems.
Group 86,
Jimmy Broere, Dennis Brouw, Xander Roovers & Rick van Sintmaartensdijk
