SNapp for Smiths News
Smiths News delivers 40 million newspapers and 14 million magazines each week to more than 30,000 retailers. This time-sensitive, complex supply chain resulted in more than 60,000 calls each week to the four UK call centres.
Smiths News delivers 40 million newspapers and 14 million magazines each week to more than 30,000 retailers. This time-sensitive, complex supply chain resulted in more than 60,000 calls each week to the four UK call centres.
Smiths News teamed up with Keytree to develop an application that would aim to reduce the number of calls to customer service by 20 percent in four years, provide a real-time interface for customer service to contact retailers. It would also need to be made available and used by all warehouses on a daily basis.
The scope of this project was to deliver a highly functional mobile application directly integrated into the core backend SAP system through SAP Gateway. It will allow real-time customer visibility to enable them to self-serve the majority of their transactional requests, with a view to saving time and money and significantly improve customer service.
By focussing on a visual set of wireframes and prototypes early on in the project, this ensured internal business partners and retail customers could input into the final design. As a consequence, they could get excited about what was coming, which was described by Smiths as critical in this industry.
The use of a base-lined project plan, reporting deviations to the project board and having an engaged project team dedicated to hitting timelines was hugely critical to overall success. Smaller parts of the project (e.g. penetration testing) were also meticulously planned to enable them to happen at the right time.
The open communication in our project engendered a public discussion of issues across the teams, fast and factual decision making and customer-driven development. This approach was key to the overall design and implementation of the project.
Smiths made it clear that the application must be driven by customer needs and not the needs of Smiths News. To ensure clarity, board level sponsorship and engagement was paramount – to the extent that the App was signed off at Group Exec Level.
The SNapp application has been awarded the Gold Award for Mobility Innovation by SAP.
The app also led to Smiths News winning the Association of Circulation Executives Award for Customer Excellence in the press industry.
Working with SAP and Keytree, Smiths News engaged in a design thinking workshop to develop SNapp – a mobile app that integrates with SAP ERP and can be used by retail customers to manage deliveries make alterations submit claims and reorganize orders while on the go.
Marcus Cotes – IT Director, Smiths News
By the end of October 2014 SNapp had achieved the following landmarks: