Marstons (previously known as Wolverhampton & Dudley Breweries) is a leading UK brewing and pub retailing business and wanted to ensure that all public house maintenance issues were resolved quickly and to the high level of quality, minimising potential loss of revenue. 

Bluefin worked with Marstons to deliver a solution based on SAP CRM 4.0 and SAP Business Warehouse to help deliver improved management of maintenance issues providing full logging and tracking and post resolution auditing of maintenance issues against agreed Service Level Agreements. 

In a little over 3 months after the project was instigated, users were already live and significantly improved levels of customer service were being provided. 

Business Issues

Ensuring that maintenance issues are addressed in a timely manner is key to ensuring that houses generate maximum revenue.  Outstanding maintenance and related activities can lead to pubs loosing custom through a substandard customer experience and potentially result in fines or temporary closure from non-compliance with a myriad of regulations. 

Wolverhampton and Dudley uses third party contractors to carry out maintenance tasks but have in-house customer service advisors who, supported by a team of surveyors, manage the maintenance processes including ensuring the contractors complete work and maintenance problems are resolved in a timely manner. 

The existing system did not provide the necessary information and controls to monitor contractor performance and it was not uncommon for issues to remain unresolved longer than necessary due to failures in communication and lack of visibility of work completed versus work still outstanding.

The Bluefin Solution

After evaluating a number of options W&DB chose SAP CRM to enable the required improvements.

Bluefin worked with W&DB business and IT staff to define a solution based around CRM 4.0.  The solution tracked all maintenance issues and automatically kept customer service and house managers fully informed of progress, including any delays. 

Positive Confirmation

The new system introduced the concept of positive confirmation.  Previously, W&DB had relied on their third party contractors to inform them of any delays or where the problem couldn?t be fixed in a single visit.  If a contractor omitted to inform W&DB of any delay then it was assumed that the work had been completed satisfactorily to schedule.  The new solution required positive confirmation that the work had been carried out on time and if not what the next steps were. 

Assisted Purchase Order Creation

Information captured during the call with the house manager is also used to simplify the creation of purchase orders for contractors making use of extensive integration between IC Web Client and R/3.