Dynamics 365 quenches G&J Pepsi-Cola Bottlers’ thirst for innovation, integration, and agility

Striving for more, even while on top, is foundational to this value-seeking innovator’s success 

G&J Pepsi-Cola Bottlers, the largest family-owned and operated independent U.S. Pepsi franchise bottler, is a respected leader in its industry. And yet this 10-time Pepsi corporate customer service award winner is changing its account acquisition, customer service, and field service core processes to get even better. As a result, salespeople are converting more leads to satisfied customers, customers are getting even better service, and field service technicians are increasing first-time-fix rates. 

G&J Pepsi unlocks new and existing revenue opportunities by empowering workers and optimizing operations 

G&J Pepsi needed a digital thread to connect business functions and found Microsoft Dynamics 365 provided superior integration, allowed for application portfolio simplification, and played well to G&J Pepsi’s IT strengths. Brian Balzer, VP of Digital Technology & Business Transformation at G&J Pepsi, shares, “If we are going to lean into 2021 and beyond, we have to change how we think about our business and how digital transformation supports it.” And that’s just what they did—and so much more. 

Starting with the end in mind—use innovation to achieve priority objectives 

Sixteen-hundred G&J Pepsi employees supply Pepsi and alliance products such as Starbucks, Gatorade, and Dr. Pepper to six million people across thousands of customers in Central and Southern Ohio and Eastern Kentucky. It’s a complex business, covering manufacturing, warehousing, distribution, trucking, digital print, and more. G&J Pepsi produces, bottles, markets, sells, and distributes beverages consumed on-premises—restaurants, schools, entertainment complexes—as well as those purchased in retail outlets. A large part of the business is providing and servicing accompanying coolers and dispensing equipment and signage.  

G&J Pepsi’s biggest white-space opportunity for new business is to utilize its field service workforce to service equipment—beverage and non-beverage—beyond its existing sales territory. Balzer explains, “Getting first-time-fix service completed properly will allow us to expand beyond our market territory to service other customers. It's the biggest opportunity we have to generate additional revenue. With Dynamics 365 Field Service and Sales, we now have tools and technologies that we were limited by before.”

To realize revenue potential, frontline workers, including sales and field service, need to be unified in the cross-functional customer journey. G&J Pepsi also knew a huge opportunity existed to accelerate its end-to-end customer process; this includes steps such as lead generation, new customer account creation, payment establishment, equipment preparation, installation scheduling, equipment installation, equipment servicing, equipment recovery, and every accompanying process. What was key to creating a unified, optimized customer journey? Centralizing real-time data with a scalable solution.  

Unifying cross-functional support by removing all barriers to customer visibility 

First stop on G&J Pepsi’s overall ERP and digital transformation journey was creating a Customer Engagement Management platform (CEM) with Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Field Service. The customer is at the center of everything the company does, but its work processes and supporting technology told a different story. Sales, field service, and other interactions with the customer were siloed.

Sales had no visibility to when equipment for a new customer would be installed or when a beverage machine would be serviced. A field service technician had no visibility into what a salesperson knew about operating hours, equipment needs, and store nuances. Work was recorded in Excel spreadsheets, hand-written notebooks, and batch systems that lagged in reporting past actions. Multiple interactions and people were required to solve an issue, but all of that happened outside of a common platform so “simple” pieces of information were not so simple to acquire.

(Bottom) With Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Field Service, G&J Pepsi has real-time visibility, leading to better decision-making, more efficient service, and opportunities for new revenue streams. 

Amanda Rust, former Business Development Representative (BDR) and now Process Leader at G&J Pepsi, explained, “Before CEM, when I was preparing for a sales call, I had to look at my notes on paper or in my computer, VIP, Power BI, VMMS, and SharePoint.” Plus, there was no view into interactions that might have happened with her customer from the customer service representative or the field service technician. “We had no way to transfer knowledge. We had no infrastructure for tracking leads,” says Rust. In fact, when the G&J Digital Technology and Business Transformation team was building its use case to develop CEM several years ago, it found it was missing nearly $180,000 in revenue per month from inefficiencies and lost sales without centralized, real-time information. 

Nate Foster, ERP Manager at G&J Pepsi shares, “Dynamics 365 allows us to simplify our entire service team’s ability to engage with one another to service our customers. Our information is live, up to the minute.” Now Rust and other BDRs can look in CEM and see just what’s happened. And as alluded to earlier, it’s changing the game on following up and converting leads to new business.  

“It empowers me to get out there and get more leads. It gives me more time to focus on new business,” concludes Rust. G&J Pepsi has three main sources for leads. Now they are directed to the best-suited BDR through CEM, increasing the likelihood of capturing new business. Since inception, 1,600 leads have been added, and the company has grown three market share points. 

In the past, sales, field service, and leadership learned about what was happening with customers in indirect, incomplete, time-lagging pathways. Now information is up to date and accessible by all who impact customers.  

“The real-time aspect of the system (Dynamics 365) has been a game-changer for us. We can see what is happening as it happens. With the old system, we would have to wait about 24 hours to be able to see what was done and know what was going on,” explains Russ Morton, Sales Equipment Manager at G&J Pepsi.  

Brian Howell, Sales Equipment Manager at G&J Pepsi, further explains the impact of real-time visibility. “Just today, a delivery team went to exchange a piece of equipment. The work order actually had an incorrect asset. In the past, I could not have done anything. Today, I went into the desktop, pulled up the asset, clicked the correct one, and seconds later the delivery team had the correct information and could finish the job.” With the old system, the technician would have been forced to leave, reconcile the equipment needed, and return to the customer to finish the work order at a later date. 

Technicians now have the data that empowers them to arrive at the right time (receive operating hours and suggested installation time from the BDR), on the right schedule (schedulers can review the technician’s other work to optimally schedule), the right way (integrated mapping functionality), and with the right equipment (obtained from the work order supplemented with account history.)  

David Lyons, Service Technician at G&J Pepsi shares, “We can look in the system and see where parts are located. If it’s in stock, out of stock, can be ordered. Our old system only allowed for something like 150 characters of communication. We had to reach out to dispatchers all the time.” To allow for continuous improvement and to troubleshoot field issues, G&J Pepsi has channels to quickly escalate field issues back to the resources that can resolve systemically or escalate further.

From the mobile app, technicians have all their pertinent information at their fingertips—service tasks, customer details, product needs, and more. The result? Higher first-time-fix rates, opening the door to utilize field technicians’ time and expertise to create new revenue streams.  

Below are several screenshots reflecting field technicians’ views from their mobile devices. Please refer to the downloads to see screenshots of CEM from the perspective of sales, schedulers, management, and others.

Knowledge fuels agility 

G&J Pepsi’s data resides in Microsoft Dataverse and is accessed through Dynamics 365 Sales or Dynamics 365 Field Service, depending on a frontline employee’s role. Completing certain actions within Dynamics 365 triggers a Power Automate flow to kick off another process. For example, a piece of equipment is requested by a BDR for a new customer. Once the BDR puts in the request for equipment for a new customer, the creation of a new work order is triggered, which moves through equipment prep to scheduling a field technician for installation.  

Several actions can take place in parallel, such as generating an account number, establishing credit and payment preferences, and staging needed equipment. This had been a linear, manual process that slowed down the entire process. Seufer shares, “We couldn’t start processing equipment until an order got all the way through the system. When placing equipment, trying to do deliveries—it was all done on paper. We had to take that paper back in the office and re-key to update the system.” Now things happen in parallel, saving days, increasing accuracy, and shrinking the sale to consumption cycle. “Everything is in one spot. People have more access to information than ever before.”  

The “little” things that cause big delays—not having a password to a one-off system, not understanding how to access a system from the field, not wanting to use another system since it’s clunky and provides incomplete information—have been eliminated. 

Maximizing functionality to perform core jobs more efficiently 

G&J Pepsi is taking full advantage of the many built-in features in Dynamics 365. The scheduling team utilizes capabilities to assign best resources to a work order and can now look across service locations instead of only selecting from a smaller subset of available technicians. Field service technicians use the mobile app’s built-in map and routing features to optimize travel time and status flags to indicate if they are on-site or traveling. With minimal development effort, G&J extended the mobile app to provide technicians the ability to generate service reports while at a customer site and instantly email.

What follows is an overview of one of the processes handled in CEM. This demonstrates an overview of the new customer flow from sales, field service, and other departments at G&J Pepsi.

Dynamics 365 is customized to G&J’s exact needs—built to simplify and enhance  

By focusing on underlying business processes, G&J Pepsi has been able to realize exponentially more improvements. The digital transformation and business process team is made up of IT purists supplemented with business leaders. The team members play to their strengths, creating an approach centered on integration with the ability to add incremental functionality. They are selectively building their DevOps skills driving toward application simplification leveraging the Microsoft suite of services.  

The team mapped out 150 processes and eliminated 200 problems prior to digitizing. How? By working directly with the eventual customers of the system—sales, field service, frontline workers. One such effort eliminated 170,000 manual touchpoints annually. Balzer explains: “Our Equipment Move Operation (EMO) process had 17 manual steps. We perform about 10,000 a year. That’s 170,000 manual touchpoints annually. We’ve automated that process with Dynamics 365 and Power Automate. What required 17 manual interventions over four days, now takes about a minute.”

Change is never easy, but the team bypassed major adoption issues by including frontline employees through all stages of development, testing and deployment. Tenured field service technicians saw the immediate benefits the system provided in making their work more efficient and easier, motivating them to adopt new ways. Their ideas and needs are reflected in the solution. In fact, newer field service technicians have been attracted to working at G&J Pepsi based on better tools and information flow and, therefore, a better working environment.  

“The ability for us to customize the platform helped us increase adoption. We trimmed anything we didn’t need, so the screen was meaningful to the technician. Exactly what is needed, no more, no less,” explains Foster. G&J Pepsi found Dynamics 365 to be fully functional OOB (out of the box) but easily customizable to suit their exact needs. The mobile app provided all the functionality G&J Pepsi desired, with the option to easily remove what it didn’t want.

The team dove into mapping out processes in the spring of 2020 and kicked its Dynamics 365 learning plan into high gear with a partner, RSM, over the summer of 2020. By fall, development efforts were at their peak. The CEM tool was deployed for broad use for the on-premises sales team in February 2021 and was deployed to the service team in May 2021. Having Microsoft Teams capability enabled on-going collaboration within the group, even during longer periods of working remotely. 

A seamless view of the end-to-end customer journey delivers significant outcomes 

The positive results have impacted everyone who touches the customer. Improvements are across a wide range of sales, service, and overall company key measures. Here are several highlights:

What’s next? 

G&J Pepsi will continue to champion integration across its technology, with immediate plans to migrate more data into Dataverse. This will enable greater visibility and functionality for multiple scenarios, including reporting driver mileage accurately by state and enabling corporate promotional planning to effected salespeople/field technicians. 

Team members are excited to explore Dynamics 365 Remote Assist’s mixed-reality capabilities to both grow their service business as well as build knowledge across existing and newer agents. G&J Pepsi’s first-time-fix use case explores technician access to real-time virtual visual expertise and the ability to increase on-site resolution.  

Knowledge articles will help increase first-time-fix rates by democratizing knowledge for service assets. Again, this information is at technicians’ fingertips, included right in the work order. The capabilities enhanced from these features are foundational to G&J’s revenue generation opportunity to expand its current asset-servicing model to net-new customers. 

The ERP and digital transformation roadmap spans several years, with a steady stream of adding Dynamics 365 modules, including Finance, Supply Chain, and Human Resources. Consolidation to the Dynamics 365 platform unlocks access to real-time data, empowering G&J Pepsi with new insights and business building ideas. 

Eric McKinney, Enterprise Infrastructure Director at G&J Pepsi, was the company pioneer to use low-code applications. Efforts have grown from one citizen developer to a 10-person DevOps organization centered around the full suite of Microsoft products.  

True to how G&J runs its business, McKinney attributes success to frontline workers and the team, who have made everyone’s ability to serve the customer exponentially better. “We have a lot of really talented people who have shared their vision, philosophies, and inputs to help make Dynamics 365 come to life.” This functionally diverse, curious-minded team is bringing G&J Pepsi forward on the next wave of innovation.

G&J Pepsi-Cola continues to optimize field operations with Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service. The franchise bottler will use Copilot to triage, schedule, and respond to customers’ broken equipment and replenishment need requests. With Copilot streamlining work order management, manual steps will be minimized across the three systems G&J Pepsi-Cola frontline managers currently use. "I am really excited about working with Copilot capabilities as I believe it will completely change the way our employees at G&J Pepsi interact with Dynamics 365 Field Service," McKinney says. "It will be a game changer for our field service and frontline teams, allowing them to enhance their best-in-class service by getting access to the information they need faster than ever before."