The Big Picture

As a subsidiary of greeting card goliath Hallmark Cards Inc., Binney & Smith strives to be preeminent in the arts, crafts and stationary segments by fully leveraging its strongest assets -- key consumer brands that include Crayola, Silly Putty, Portfolio Series, Model Magic and InkTank.

However, in its quest to achieve market leadership, Binney & Smith has faced challenges that have, until now, prevented greater sales volume and account profitability.
For starters, as much as 50 percent of promotional spend was not driving a sales lift.

"A large concern of ours was that we spend a considerable amount of money each year on trade promotions, yet we had no way of accurately monitoring those funds or gauging their effectiveness," says Colin Gelfer, manager of trade services, Binney & Smith.

Adverse conditions such as this led Binney & Smith to acknowledge a need to migrate from extensive use of Excel spreadsheets for account planning, trade funds management and event planning toward a comprehensive enterprise system. According to Gelfer, the company "wanted to improve the overall visibility into trade funds and sales plans, quantify their effectiveness and, ultimately, build better plans for its customer base," which includes food, drug, mass retailers and educational distributors.

The Siebel Solution
Binney & Smith chose to implement Siebel Systems' Siebel Consumer Goods 7.5 -- a comprehensive industry-specific solution that enables manufacturers to manage relationships across the entire demand chain. Marketing, sales and customer services are fully integrated, allowing companies to improve trade marketing, decrease customer service costs, collaborate with partners and customers, and build customer loyalty and demand.

For Binney & Smith, the optimal end-result would be to leverage Siebel Consumer Goods to support account planning, trade funds management, promotion planning and deduction management. The Crayola brand owner would then integrate key CRM data with its external legacy system.

On Time and On Budget
Binney & Smith went live with Siebel Consumer Goods 7.5 in December 2003. Several factors helped the implementation project to be delivered on budget and in less than five months.

Binney & Smith teamed with Bay Street Solutions to develop a CRM blueprint and implement Siebel technology. By leveraging Siebel ISD methodology from Bay Street, Binney & Smith was able to establish a project plan, work estimates and critical project deliverables.

"Bay Street Solution helped the Binney & Smith IT organization to stay on track throughout the entire implementation process," says Gelfer. "Their industry experience, program leadership and Siebel product knowledge led to an excellent end product."

Gelfer also notes that the project experienced 75 percent user acceptance only three months into production, far ahead of schedule.

"The reason we see such strong user acceptance is that we engaged the end user community up front," says Gelfer. "We got their input on what the solution should look like and how the solution could deliver value to the organization."

Binney & Smith's executive management also played an extensive role in strategy definition, business process design and change management as they champion organizational change and investments in technology.

"It was a priority of senior management to enable Binney & Smith employees with better technology so that they can be more productive in how they manage business," says Gelfer.

Additionally, because several business processes are embedded into the Siebel solutions that significantly reduce the amount of configuration customers need, Binney & Smith was able to leverage Siebel without making a tremendous amount of changes and customization to the out-of-the-box product. This allowed Binney & Smith to leverage best practices already inherent in the Siebel solution and cut out extraneous configuration work.

On the Bright Side
Currently, Binney & Smith is primarily using Siebel to manage trade promotions activity and sales planning. In the long-term, the largest benefit that Binney & Smith expects is an increase in return on investment for its trade funds.

In the mean time, the short-term benefits achieved from migrating to a comprehensive enterprise system are booming. Binney and Smith is saving roughly 40 to 50 man hours a month due to the removal of a month-end trade spend reporting process.

The company has also banked approximately $120,000 in 2004 by eliminating redundant or obsolete technology. "Basically, Siebel can do what it took three or four systems (Gelco, Informix and ultimately Maximizer) to do in the past," says Gelfer.

Analytic Advantage
The Siebel solution's post-promotional analytical capabilities provide significantly improved promotional effectiveness from trade fund investments. "Instead of spending all their time running reports, we now have folks doing more analytical work," says Gelfer.

Thanks to savings of nearly $70,000 in advertising production costs, newfound and real-time access to account plans impacts decision making on advertising schedules.
Additionally, improved communication with Binney & Smith's field personnel contributes to a 25 percent reduction in deduction processing time.

But according to Gelfer, the most important outcome that the company has experienced so far is the day-to-day tactical management of its trade marketing and promotions business.

"We have far more visibility into our trade funds and how they are performing at retail that we have ever had in the past," says Gelfer.