Big brand manufacturers get sell side e-business from Blue Martini

Blue Martini Software isn’t a name that springs readily to mind in manufacturing, but this three year old, Nasdaq registered firm expects to become so – at least among the £500 million-plus multi-national brand manufacturers with complex routes to market. Yesterday, the firm launched ‘Blue Martini Manufacturing’, which it says will improve said corporates’ marketing and sell side activities in both direct and indirect distribution channels – by allowing them to deploy highly functional customer and partner self-service portals that automatically deal with the inevitable complexity and the back end routing and management processes. In fact, it combines Blue Martini’s existing so-called ‘external customer relationship management’ (eCRM) applications with new automated business processes which it says are specific to manufacturing, plus industry-specific templates for rapid implementation. Included are distributed multi-language, multi-currency content and catalogue management, business intelligence, all the electronic transactional sales and invoicing side, lead and distributed sales order management, and global returns management. There is direct integration into SAP and Oracle ERP systems – APIs for the rest – and the system runs on most of the major platforms. Some 20 top end manufacturers currently use the earlier Blue Martini suite, including Harley Davidson, Rhodia (Rhone Poulenc subsidiary), Levis, Barry Callebrant, Polaroid, Oce. And it is those that span the retail end – Blue Martini’s sweet spot – that look to have most to gain. Laurent Pacalin, vice president of marketing, particularly cites its value in the CPG (consumer packaged goods) sector, where there is most emphasis is on promotions, new introductions and multi-channel management. A recent addition is sports equipment maker Wilson Sporting Goods. Wilson plans to deploy Blue Martini catalogue and content management features to manage the Wilson product catalogue, with a phased implementation during 2002. The catalogue will be published to multiple Wilson interfaces as well as to its channel partners over the web. “We were looking for a solution that would enable us to market to our consumers, at the same time as supporting our channel,” says Wilson’s director of interactive marketing Rick Kerpsack. When consumers coming to its site are ready to buy, he says they will be routed to the most appropriate channel partner (local retailer) for fulfilment. And it’s this sort of application that Blue Martini Manufacturing’s new modules will appeal to. Pacalin says it will: reduce the costs of populating, managing and deploying product and content catalogues; accelerate time-to-market for new products; improve the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. It will, he insists also maximise revenue “by selling the way customers want to buy”; and drive greater revenue by proactively bringing in channel partners, whoever and wherever they are. “With this release, we are increasing our out-of-the-box functionality to the next level by delivering solutions tailored specifically for manufacturers. We’re helping manufacturers to leverage the Internet for better marketing, sales and service through both their direct and indirect distribution channels.” On pricing and availability, users can purchase the application at about £50,000 per CPU, or £100,000 per application (Blue Martini Marketing, Commerce, Channels and Service). Implementation partners include IBM Global Services and others in the Big Six, plus regional integrators. Shipping is expected in Q1 2002.