Britvic buys £1m intelligence tools

Soft drinks manufacturer Britvic hopes a £1m investment in business intelligence software will provide its staff with information that can be used to boost its profits.

The company, which makes drinks with the Tango and Robinsons brands, and has the UK franchise for Pepsi, has installed tools from Microstrategy across its operations in 21 offices.

Britvic has spent around £1m installing the tools and training its staff. Director of IT Mike Jones says the software will generate information that will help employees to improve the company's competitiveness.

'One of the key things we are trying to change is the way our commercial people behave so they can make better decisions,' he said. 'We are moving from a volume orientation to a profit orientation.'

The company has replaced an Oracle system with the Microstrategy Web tools. Jones says the previous system could not meet the company's need to deploy a generic system across the organisation.

The new software is being used by customer and business development managers to run reports and analyse data about product volumes and contribution against performance information, on a customer-by-customer basis.

The company believes this information will allow it to identify 'profit improvement opportunities' for its customers.

'We have replaced an Oracle system, but that was used by a much smaller number of people,' Jones said. 'What we really wanted to do with Microstrategy was considerably extend the number of users. There was 50 or so with Oracle - now there's 250 - and they're different types of users.'

Britvic started the replacement of the Oracle system in October 2001. The Microstrategy tools have now been installed and most staff have completed their training.

Jones says it is difficult to calculate when the organisation will see a return on its investment, but is confident it will occur in the not too distant future.

'The fact that we've provided this system doesn't necessarily mean people will actually make better decisions. But I would hope we would start to see some real impact as we go through this year,' he said.