Case studies
Leading luxury car brand in China
Improving sales efficiency and customer experience by simplifying sales processes, digital transformation, personalised care and frontline staff capability improvement.
Client's challenge
This is one of the biggest producers of premium cars and one of the world's biggest manufacturers of commercial vehicles. They have experienced fast growing sales volume in the past few year; however, they have issues of long wait time for retail customers and at times poor customer experience, primarily due to sub-optimal sales processes and a lack of priority on customer experience. The situation is complicated by the high turnover rate of frontline retail sales staff, which is a common issue across the industry in China.
Approach
We worked jointly with the client to review existing retail sales processes, to identify efficiency and customer experience improvement areas through interviews, dealer visits, customer focus group and benchmarking.
The efficiency issues were classified by owner (OEM, investors or dealers) while improvement suggestions were discussed and aligned separately via a series of workshops. We reviewed and identified high priority frontline people issues, developed quick-win solutions and also identified future improvement areas. The tailored collaborative quick-win solutions have already been implemented in selected pilot dealers.
Impact
We successfully reduced car hand-over time for customer from 5-6 hours to 3 hours in pilot dealers while also enhancing the customer experience with a personalised and digital sales process. Moreover, according to our mid-term road map, the client is now able to replicate the pilot success to the larger dealer network in China. And in the term, the client will work on identified areas for digital integration and transformation to further enhance its efficiency in both internal operation and customer experience.
A leading multinational pharmaceutical company
Transforming business by leveraging machine learning and exploring business model innovation
Client's challenge
A major business unit of this client was tasked to drive significant growth while maintaining a neutral cost base. In China, the client has 2,000 sales representatives in this BU covering major hospitals in large cities. The client is not only facing internal pressure (frozen headcount and cost reduction), but also facing external pressure related to medical reform in China. The client wanted to use analytics to optimise their promotional efforts for key products, and in Phase II explore further growth opportunities to expand its business.
Approach
Phase 1 focused on optimising hospital promotion, including data collection and cleansing, data modelling and analysis, and providing insight and recommendations at hospital and regional levels, in various scenarios based on different policy assumptions.
- Data collection and cleansing – PwC collected the hospital promotion activity data and conducted the external research to identify the impacts from policy changes.
- Modeling and analysis – PwC incorporated a variety of client data sources and external research data to develop a hospital level sales response and scenario planning tool to assess the impact of changes in assumptions.
- Insight and recommendation – Base on modeling results, PwC provided recommendations on promotion optimisation at both hospital and regional levels, as well as various recommendations based on policy assumptions.
Phase 2 focused on exploring business model innovation to develop future sales strategy, including business assessment, innovation exploration, playbook design and resource optimisation.
- Business assessment – PwC conducted an internal assessment to review current business performance and optimisation opportunities, as well as an external assessment to capture policy impacts to the business, competitor analysis and the innovations in the industry.
- Innovation models research and playbook design – PwC conducted an in-depth analysis on the business model innovations and its implications, helped optimise hospital segmentation and developed its corresponding tactics for business growth.
- Resource optimisation – PwC helped define the resource implications of the new business model and developed recommendations for implementation.
Impact
In Phase I, we helped the client improve promotion effectiveness for their target hospitals, and provided recommendations to optimise the sales organisation. In Phase II, we helped the client further identify several business growth opportunities based on patient journey and develop innovative business models for business expansion. The customised approach was highly regarded by the senior leaders and we are in discussion of roll out to other business units.
A leading eCommerce player
Using blockchain to build trust in the food & beverage supply chain
Client’s challenge
Multiple scandals ranging from rebottled beer to synthetic rice has resulted in a widespread distrust among Chinese consumers. In response, a group of industry leaders including a giant eCommerce player, international nutritional brands and logistics players came together to tackle the following question: how can we use technology to build trust?
Approach
Base on the needs and concerns of the market, PwC helped the client to come out with 4 core principle to drive the solution design. It must be a cost-efficiency solution on both investment and efforts and build in customer-based. It should allow increased transparency and security but have flexibility as well to accommodate changing regulation and technologies. According to these 4 principles, PwC uses blockchain as the foundation of the entire traceability solution and thoroughly enhances the security and efficiency of the original data-base, enabling customers to visit credible and essential data at any time.
Impact
With the brand new data system, PwC helped the client build an information solution enabling transparent and efficient communication. It simplified inner inventory and employee regulation and more importantly, successfully build customer’s trust. To PwC, this is a huge success to integrate blockchain into data system and design customised functions for our clients.
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HR Transformation
Transforming HR to become a true highly effective partner
Client’s challenge
The client needed to transform their HR operation to be fit for future growth, to achieve its aggressive 5 year growth targets. Also, the complexity in business mix, way of working as well as fast change in the industry put the human capital at the centre stage among leadership. Therefore, the implications for HR is to be business-centric, result-oriented, and to deliver sufficient value to business; to build a highly effective HR operating system (including process, organisation, IT and people capabilities).
Approach
- Helped the client diagnose HR operations from both outside-in and inside-out perspectives in customer offering, people & organisation, process, IT and data. Leveraging leading practice and change workshops, PwC help the client identify key gaps and develop the blueprint and roadmap design.
- Use customer centric approach to identify the current services gap in HR and develop differentiated value propositions for various stakeholders. Building on above value propositions, to redesign to-be processes, organisational structure, TOM, service offering and service delivery model as well as measurement and digital experiences.
- Conducted key strategic topics such as people analytics, strategic workforce planning, digital HR, Global mobility, EVP etc. with various industry best practices from our global network, to define the high-level future state.
- Developed the future application and the information architecture design to incorporate the requirements from change directions into an integrated solution, and guide POC processes for future vendor selection.
Impact
PwC provided in-depth industry knowledge and best practice through our global network to deliver leading insight on critical HR topics. This formed the basis for the future change direction. The client in now able to define various sub projects to address key gaps in transformation journey and enhance their HR operating model and system.
A leading investment group
Developing a financial consolidation and reporting management system rooted in China
Client’s challenge
The major portfolio companies of client include investments in health and medicine, real estate, iron and steel, mining, retail, culture, service and other industries. As rising bottlenecks and risks disrupt existing reporting flow and tools, the client is finding it hard to ensure the quality and efficiency of its financial information. Efficient support in richer financial data for its investment strategies is needed. At the same time, the increasingly complex investment network is rendering its statistic management even more challenging. Therefore, the client requires a fast and efficient way to draw a clear and complete picture on its investment map.
Approach
By adopting information technology and the Hyperion software, the PwC team, in close collaboration with financial leaders, business personnel, and external auditing teams, implemented a new Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) application. We also customised a multifunctional data collection tools for the client. Meanwhile, the project team also co-created a financial data warehouse with the client to collect detailed financial statistics as part of a future business intelligence platform.
Impact
By utilising the HFM functions of processing management, data collection and validation, inter-transaction elimination, ownership adjustment and consolidation reporting, the client is able to shorten its financial consolidation time. Thus, satisfying the needs of a complete financial report encompassing flow schemes, full entity scope, all segments, and full scenario coverage, within the group.
