Quilmes

Customer Clustering solution

November 2008

Company overview:

Quilmes Brewery is one of the largest beverage companies in Argentina. It produces, elaborates, distributes and markets beers, soft drinks, mineral water, juices, and sport drinks in alliance with international leader companies such as PepsiCo and Nestlé.
The company has 4,700 employees and owns 11 industrial plants and one brewery, seven distribution centers and a 200 independent distributors network. During 2004-2007, Quilmes has invested more than 300 million dollars in production technologies and has exported its production to more than 20 countries around the world.

Industry:

Beverages and brewery

Solution:

Customer Clustering Solution module for Quilmes’ Customer Management System (GPQ).

Quilmes needed to expand its Customer Management System (GPQ) by means of a Customer Clustering module that could identify and classify consumers according to their shopping behaviors. This would allow the company to shape and focus its marketing campaigns in conformity with several percentage considerations, using a predefined customer classification algorithm.

The main challenge was to build the new module inside the company's architecture, using the same internal framework components, and observing its general software design and style, so as to ensure integration and scalability.

Quilmes framework integrated several open source solutions such as Struts, Spring, and Hibernate, and included established services structures and DataAccessObjets which guarantee transactionality. It was required that this framework was guaranteed to make sure the standardization of the solution.

In one month time, Business Vision completed and delivered all Technical and Functional Requirements documentation and successfully tested and deployed the solution as it was required by Quilmes.

Collaborative development tools provided by Business Vision facilitated project tasks and team coordination between Quilmes and our Software Factory, enabling simple and professional process documentation as well as fluid communication throughout the entire project.

DEVELOPMENT TOOLS & TECHNOLOGIES MATRIX

Technologies, tools and frameworks:

• JDK 1.4.x
• Struts 1.2.9
• Spring (core) 2.0.8
• Hibernate 3.2.4
• Interfaces Service Manager y Data Access Object de Quilmes

Development and testing environment:

• Eclipse IDE 3.3
• Apache Tomcat 5.5
• Subversion (SVN)

Customer clustering integration allowed Quilmes to standardize its customer classification process. This allowed the company to plan more accurate promotional and marketing campaigns, based on sales variations by volume and type of product.

The solution is fully integrated to the system and maintained under its control. This can help future changes. Moreover, delivered support documentation will ease new functionalities add-ons as well as any future changes that the Quilmes development team or any third parties could do.