Belgium’s Spadel operates as a water producer and retail company within a broad socio-economic context. In order to best respond and anticipate challenges, such as changing consumption patterns and increasing competition, it is necessary to put maximum effort into innovations. ‘Our new SAP Sales Cloud platform fits perfectly with that vision,’ says Xavier Broucke, Business Partner at Spadel.
Spadel operates in Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Bulgaria. The holding company manages brands such as Spa, Bru, Carola, Wattwiller and Devin. The water business is currently undergoing a profound transformation, driven by changed consumer needs, fluctuating market dynamics and rapid technological advances, among others. ‘We need to be able to accurately, quickly and vigorously anticipate and respond to this,’ says Broucke.
‘With the new SAP Sales Cloud platform, data is updated and insightful in real time through a single system’
A new SAP Sales Cloud platform is helping the company do just that. The former CRM system Spadel used to manage its customer relationships and sales in retail and hospitality no longer met today’s challenges. Broucke: ‘We had two systems: a mobile application for the sales developers and a management system for the back office team. The mobile application was mainly used in an offline mode. This sometimes caused communication problems between the two systems. Consequence: the data used for reporting was not always up-to-date and correct, and that hampered the decision-making process.
Targeted implementation and solution
There was a clear need for a new approach to improve efficiency and decision-making. The use of different systems also meant there was a lack of uniformity and centralised data. With delaware as its technology partner, Spadel is now implementing a future-proof solution for all those challenges.
‘With the new Sales Cloud platform, data is updated and insightful in real time through one system,’ clarifies Simon Depuydt, SAP Customer Experience Lead at delaware. The development was done through workshops and demo sessions with key users of the system. ‘Every user now has access to the most up-to-date data and can use it to generate reports and base decisions and actions on it.’
Perfectly matching company ambitions and customer expectations
Sales staff can also use the system to automatically calculate and monitor a retail outlet’s Perfect Store Score. A perfect shop has the optimal balance between product, price, place, promotion, people and processes (the 6 Ps). Sales specialists can now take targeted actions to maximise that score. Spadel and delaware defined the outline for the new system in November 2022, which is currently being rolled out step-by-step in the various countries where the watermark operates. ‘We are already working with it in Belgium and France. The Netherlands will follow at the end of this year,’ says Broucke.
The solution also fits in with Spadel’s ambitions to further reduce its ecological footprint in the coming years, as it did recently with the introduction of the 100% recyclable Eco Pack. In fact, more and more customers expect their favourite water brand to make efforts to achieve this. Thanks to the up-to-date and correct data in the SAP Sales Cloud platform, we can also organise our sales teams, who are present at customers’ premises, more efficiently,’ concludes Broucke.
‘Thanks to always up-to-date and correct data, we can also organise our sales teams more efficiently’