Boots Wellbeing is a joint venture between the Boots Company plc and Granada Media plc. The company's business-to-consumer e-commerce Web site Wellbeing.com offers a line of beauty, baby, nutrition, healthcare, and gift products.

Boots Wellbeing started the business from scratch, with a clean sheet of paper, says Jon Longstaff, systems architect. The company turned to SAP for a combination of integrated solutions to drive its new venture: SAP Retail, SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM), and SAP Business Intelligence (SAP BI).

We use SAP Retail for operating the day-to-day business: financials, product management, purchasing, and merchandise planning, says Mark Dearnley, chief operating officer. Once orders are fulfilled, we use the SAP Business Warehouse component of SAP BI to analyze customers, profitability, and product sales. We use SAP CRMs Marketing Campaign Management functionality, along with SAP BI, to segment our customer database of more than 350,000 customers and e-mail these customers on a regular basis. This is all being driven out of SAP and has proved very successful.

Much of that success derives from Boots Wellbeing getting closer to its customers.

We know who our customers are now. We've got them in our system and we can run proper campaigns, says Longstaff. One of our next steps will be personalized promotions. We can tell our customers, We see what you've been purchasing before, we think this particular offer may be of interest to you. We will be setting this up within CRM and pushing it through to our Web site.

Best Practices Enable Rapid Rollout

Boots Wellbeing got the site up and running quickly. The company used Best Practices for SAP Retail, which contains detailed descriptions of all major e-business processes so users can quickly capitalize on new, Internet-driven business opportunities while eliminating as much risk as possible.

Boots Wellbeing leveraged Best Practices for SAP Retail to get its core merchandise and finance system up in 12 weeks in preparation for the launch of its Web store. The retail best practices provided the company, out-of-the-box, with a complete set of proven business processes for core merchandising, including inventory management, pricing, promotions, stock replenishment, purchase order management, and associated financial transactions.

As I understand it, it's probably one of the most, if not the most, rapid implementations of SAP Retail, says Simon Davies, business development manager. We're pretty proud of that.

SAP UK Consulting assisted in the accelerated deployment.

SAP UK Consulting worked with us from day one, coming in and helping us understand what our business was going to be like and how we might map that out, says Davies.

Adds Longstaff, The great thing that SAP UK Consulting brought to the party was understanding they really know the product well. They understand exactly what to do and what configuration settings work. They have seen it all before.

Continuous Improvement

Boots Wellbeing and SAP UK Consulting continue to work together to refine the business.

Since we've gone live, which has now been many months, we still work closely with SAP UK Consulting in a consulting capacity, CEO Dearnley says. They will come in, review our processes, and bring new ideas to make us more effective. This is a very long-term relationship we've built.

It's a relationship that is built on a strong foundation.

The biggest advantage of putting in the SAP solution is that it works, its solid, it scales, its robust, and we trust the information that's in it, Dearnley says. This enables us to focus on what we can offer our customers. If we say that a product is in stock, it is in stock, because we've managed real-time stock availability. If we say it will be delivered to you on this day, 99.5% of the time it will be there on the day we've promised.

Boots Wellbeing recently put that to the test.

We've just had our first Christmas trading period, Dearnley says. It was the most amazing experience. In a 12-week period, we shipped 64,000 orders to customers and our registered customer base went up to more than 350,000 customers. As a business, I think we could safely say we stress-tested every single element of the operation and learned a huge amount about being successful.

The three-way combination of SAP Retail, SAP CRM, and SAP BI means Boots Wellbeing will continue to evolve to maintain that success.

We're not the business we started off at, because we've understood it better, we know better what we're going to do, says Longstaff. I think there is a lot more we'll do beyond just selling products. We'll be able to get to people, meet people's needs more, which again comes back to understanding your customers, understanding what they need.

Adds Dearnley, Since we've gone live, it's been very simple to tailor to the way the business has changed. The joys of working in the Internet are that what takes two years in a normal business, we have to do every three months. With SAP.com, we have the tools to accomplish this.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Boots Wellbeing turned to SAP for a combination of integrated solutions to drive its new e-business venture. The company uses SAP Retail for operating the day-to-day business: financials, product management, purchasing, and merchandise planning. It uses SAP Business Intelligence to analyze customers, profitability, and product sales. It also employs SAP CRM Marketing Campaign Management functionality to segment its customer database and e-mail these customers on a regular basis.

Boots Wellbeing (7mins 44secs) ( Click here to view the text version)