Lion builds smart apps using low-code tools from SAP
Iconic beer maker Lion Pty Ltd got creative with SAP Business AI capabilities on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), crafting an innovative app that helps its people find venues serving Lion products. Using SAP Build solutions helped solve business problems with original digital innovation and also crowdsource important information for its sales team.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Consumer products | Sydney, Australia | >4,000 employees |
to build an app that normally takes months.
recommendations for Lion products.
lag time to update venue customer records, down from several hours.
Head of Enterprise Applications, Lion Pty Ltd
Digitalizing beer tap information and venue section
Lion is a leading beverages company in Australasia with fast-growing operations in the United States, offering a portfolio that includes market-leading names in beer, wine, spirits, seltzer, and nonalcoholic drinks. Its range features classic brands such as Tooheys, Speight’s, XXXX, and Wither Hills and craft beer brands such as Little Creatures, James Squire, and New Belgium’s Fat Tire Ale.
With a history of more than 180 years, Lion has built an enviable reputation for quality, craftsmanship, community, and sustainability and is Australasia’s first large-scale carbon-neutral brewer. The company’s strategic focus is on building culturally relevant brands, with a commitment to ensuring every product meets the highest standards for consumers and also contributes to a more sustainable future.
As a fast-moving consumer goods company, a big part of the company’s ethos is a relentless obsession with understanding the consumer, helping it adapt to evolving consumer tastes by quickly bringing new innovations to market. This also serves its ambition and purpose to lead the industry with exceptional, responsibly crafted beverages—making the moment mean more.
Lion was looking to solve a perennial issue for the sales team by simplifying the capture of beer tap information, which was a manual and time-consuming process that took salespeople away from selling product. In parallel, the company wanted to streamline identifying preferred venues, helping Lion employees find places that sell the Lion range on tap.
Tapping creativity and ingenuity in a mobile app
Lion applied a perfect mix of creativity and technology to tackle its business challenges. It conceptualized a fun and interactive mobile app for its employees to find preferred venues that offer Lion products on tap while also serving as a crowdsourcing tool for the sales team.
Jamie Grande, head of enterprise applications at Lion, explains, “Our salespeople were having to manually capture information relating to the products available on tap at each venue they visit. Then they had to manually enter that data into our customer relationship management system, the SAP Sales Cloud solution. Our idea was for an app to help users find the nearest venue serving Lion products and then crowdsource the information on the beers served on tap. By automatically updating SAP Sales Cloud with this information, the sales team could focus on selling.”
To develop the use case, the company joined a hackathon on SAP BTP organized by the SAP Australian User Group (SAUG). There, the team conceived a way for employees to take photos of the products served on tap in venues and for the app to recommend different Lion products based on their saved user profile and taste preferences. The photos of the products served on tap captured by employees would then be sent to SAP Sales Cloud and saved against the venue’s customer record.
With assistance from the SAP team, Lion built a working prototype using a number of innovation services on SAP BTP. This included the low-code SAP Build Apps development environment to build the app and SAP HANA Cloud for the database of venues, products, and customer preferences. To facilitate AI-based recommendations and product descriptions, Lion called on SAP Business AI offerings, specifically, the SAP AI Core foundation and SAP AI Launchpad.
In terms of the decision to use SAP BTP to develop the app, Supreeth Shamphu, enterprise architect at Lion, says that the use of SAP BTP was never in question: “Using SAP BTP was a straightforward decision. It provides the building blocks of security, technology architecture, data architecture, and data governance standards that are critical for developing use cases and applications.”
Head of Enterprise Applications, Lion Pty Ltd
Crafting original solutions that solve business pain points
Lion used SAP BTP to conceptualize the app, develop it, and then launch it through its internal marketplace. Currently available for employees, it solves the challenge of finding the nearest venue serving Lion brands on tap and helps the user find the alcoholic beverage of their taste. Using the app, employees can select a venue or pub and capture a photo of the beers on tap. As shown in the diagram, SAP Build calls Amazon Rekognition API to process the picture, identifies the Lion beers on tap, and sends the product list to SAP Build.
For product recommendations, Lion personified the AI innovation as “Joey.” Joey taps the user’s preferences and fetches information from Lion’s preloaded content in SAP HANA Cloud, providing recommendations to the user based on the list of products available on tap.
Ram Kalyanasundaram, group technology and digital transformation director at Lion, comments, “We launched our AI tool as an Aussie beer connoisseur called Joey. To create his uniquely tailored recommendations for a particular user at a particular venue, he takes in the user preferences for beer type and other attributes and matches them with the available beers on tap at the venue.”
The team can see that the Lion app has big potential to be used externally. Kalyanasundaram adds, “While the Lion mobile app was built with the intention of making it easy for our employees to find venues that serve Lion products, we can see it evolving into an app for all consumers. It encourages people to go to pubs that serve our products and actually increases the traffic going into these pubs.”
Group Technology and Digital Transformation Director, Lion Pty Ltd
Brewing new innovations faster
Aligned with its purpose of making the moment mean more, Lion is committed to developing and bringing product innovations to market at pace. From a technology perspective, the company needs to be agile and as innovative as possible in embedding new technologies in the business so Lion can be faster to the market.
Kalyanasundaram comments, “We plan to leverage SAP’s immense knowledge, and the business is definitely looking forward to that next revolution of AI. There’s a pipeline of work that we want to execute on by leveraging SAP BTP, particularly SAP Integration Suite to reduce redundancies in terms of applications. We also want to use more of the services to innovate solutions that we can release to our customers and consumers as well.”
Grande concurs, “I believe that we are still at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to innovation. There are still more things that we can do, and I can’t wait for SAP’s coming innovation. We’re really just starting out and trying to experiment and see what the tools can do.”