[Author's note: in honor of an NDA with the client, EG is a psuedonym as are the names of EG employees in this story]

EG products are marketed in almost every country worldwide. Their devices and appliances reflect the rapid changes in how millions live their lives. As the CEO of EG, North America has said: "EG innovates products that customers never knew they needed".

This approach had long served EG well but in the largest market, the US, EG had lost momentum towards the end of the 2010's. Competition from rivals like Samsung and new entrants like TCL were pressuring EG market share. Product lines like flat-screen TVs had begun to falter. Then the pandemic undercut sales of EG smartphones and other handheld devices. But that wasn't all.

The Big Problem

The bigger problem had its root in technology strategy. This became clear after a round of meetings with two senior executives at EG - Bob Lee, CSO for EG North America, and Deborah Bauman, GM of Sales Operations North America. As both Deborah and Bob hinted at, a veil of uncertainty had descended over the company.

EG had begun to struggle to answer questions it was used to mastering:

How can we verify that our products are on the store shelves they're supposed to be on?
Retail CX - how do customers actually look at, touch, hold, and choose an EG device or appliance in the store?
Can we ensure (and measure) that store workers can explain EG product benefits to shoppers?
How is the way that customer shop for EG products changing?
How can EG work with stores and retail execution agencies to get the "sell-through" data EG executives need to make decisions?

Not being able to answer questions like these was a problem for EG, as it values listening to and understanding customers.

The Investigation

The Orion team considered these issues, comparing them with their own experience with similar clients (Panasonic, Toshiba, etc). Further probing led by Orion's Dan Farrugia uncovered specific issues in the Eastern US region alone, such as:

More than a hundred field service reps capturing daily activity in completely disconnected systems
An expensive voice/video/text communication solution only partially used, and poorly integrated with the rest of EG's sales operations tech stack
The people managing "retail execution" operations not knowing what staff was doing during the day - or even where they were, from among 100s of possible retail locations
Managers with almost no visibility into metrics being collected from staff members from in-store visits and from meetings with store representatives
Store performance and product "sell-through" information collected from some retail chains and not others, from some stores and not others, and in wildly incompatible data formats

Problems like these made Orion's unique expertise in cloud technology and consumer goods attractive to EG. Led by CRM pioneer Yacov Wrocherinsky and senior consultant Dan Farrugia, Orion designed and executed a transition to the consumer goods cloud that would address every single one of these issues and many more.

Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud (SCGC)

Specifically, this meant designing an implementation of Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud. Orion was well equipped for this - we'd had provided product design guidance on SCGC to Salesforce product managers; we knew the technology intimately. SCGC served as a foundation allowed for many optimizations and innovations for EG. Among them:

Better tracking of daily activities on mobile devices, so retail execution staffers in-store "retail execution" activities were better understood
A new approach to "planograms" allowing interactive and dynamic cloud-based store mapping (we call them "cloud planograms")
Consolidating hundreds of reports and tools off of Excel and local computers to the cloud, using both OOB Salesforce solutions and custom-built solutions

But Orion took EG deeper than improvements to daily logistics execution.

Firstly it, it helped integrate call-center software Bright Pattern with EG's new consumer goods cloud. It also helped them transition off older legacy tools like SPOT out of the EG tech stack.

Getting Re-Acquainted With the Customer

More importantly, Orion helped EG with the big picture: getting back in touch with the customer. It did this partly by using Einstein Analytics and Tableau CRM to evaluate retail behavior from 1000s of independent data sources - this has helped EG to make better real-time decisions and also to re-evaluate longer terms retail and product strategies.

Orion's work has already moved the needle for EG. It's also set the stage for an even deeper EG engagement, which will lean into Tableau and facilitate an full-ecosystem integration with one of the 'Big 3' cloud providers.

Striving For Positive Impact

Already, this project has revealed what the concept of consumer goods cloud can do - positively impact the working lives of thousands of employees and millions of consumers around the world. From there, it can help create impact in local communities around the world where a firm like LG does business.

Orion is grateful to EG for their partnership and for letting them show the world how the industry can evolve towards this new paradigm.

Every great business has a story to tell.

We believe in the power of stories to inspire more innovative solutions.

Every great business has a story to tell.

We believe in the power of stories to inspire more innovative solutions.