Introduction
Britvic Soft Drinks (Britvic) is one of Europe’s leading soft drinks manufacturers, selling over 1.1 billion litres of ready-to-drink beverages per year.

Britvic is also a Knexus Member and has agreed to share insights to their current eBusiness strategy, in particular key aspects of their online sales & marketing initiatives. Britvic will be presenting a number of short case studies outlining their approach to content management, eCommerce & customer relationships, as well providing an assessment of future online opportunities.

Each case study will initiate a focused, roundtable discussion between participating members to share experience and ideas on the case study topics.

The following are short introductions for each case study:

Content Management
Until recently, Britvic’s web presence had grown rapidly but sporadically, often without sufficient controls and standards to ensure consistent branding and content. Different areas of the business were able to take their own divergent approaches to online marketing & communications, undermining the company’s ability to deliver a co-ordinated message & brand personality to both customers and consumers. This inconsistency also threatened to undermine Britvic’s growing requirements to provide and manage suitable content for third party sites such as trade portals.

In April 2002, Britvic launched its content management solution, which enables the Company to effectively manage content both on its own sites and others, as well as providing an effective process for creating new sites.

Britvic’s case study reviews their requirements & approach, together with the benefits achieved.

eCommerce + Relationship Management
Britvic’s largest customers have used technology such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) for many years. However, in recent years smaller customers have become familiar with the Internet and increasingly want to take advantage of the flexibility provided by online ordering. They do this via a selection of alternatives including internal systems, trade portals (e.g. Barbox) and individual supplier sites. For Britvic, developing an eCommerce capability to support these needs was as logical as having a telephone system to answer customer calls.

However, any solution required the flexibility to accept orders from different sources and present catalogues (as well as manage content onto the Web). Additionally, the target market segment represented a small part of overall volume (less than 25 per cent of company volume but around 55-60 per cent of company orders) and therefore a cost effective solution was required.

Britvic’s case study explains how they approached the development of Britvic Orderline, which was launched in November 2002. It also addresses how this capability is changing the nature of customer relationships, allowing Britvic’s sales & marketing teams to personalise their relationship with customers & improving the Company’s ability to effectively communicate and manage marketing and promotional opportunities (in the past, head office responsibility for passing the Britvic marketing communication and messages on to the outlets had been ineffective, undermining sales and promotional activities).

The Future
Following Britvic’s investment to change the way it manages relationships with smaller outlet customers, the Company has an ebusiness infrastructure that provides it with the flexibility to leverage other business opportunities e.g. the same solution that manages customers is now being piloted with suppliers for procurement.

Britvic will present a case study outlining how their new eBusiness infrastructure is opening up a range of exciting business opportunities for the Company.