PepsiCo IT redefines direct-to-store business model success

As part of this project, Venkat and his team built a mobile banking feature to enable employees to take checks or money orders from customers and deposit them using their iPhone. “We tried to use a leading check capture solution but due to some legal issues of that company, we could not acquire the licenses. We developed our own check capture feature with blur detection, outline cropping, and many other features to implement the check deposit successfully,” Venkat says.

To ensure tier 1 uptime, the SalesHub+ project team developed real-time monitoring and alerting systems. As part of that effort, the team also employed AI/ML models to detect errors and patterns from log files. “These levels of monitoring systems were not built for any application in PepsiCo before,” he says.

PepsiCo’s shift to iPhones also helped with connecting frontline employees to the peripherals, such as printers, scanners, and DEX cables, that they need to perform their daily activities.

“We chose a Bluetooth printer, BLE DEX cable, and a scanner that was attached to the phone. We had to create full-on integrations with all these peripherals and they seem to be time savers for the users. We also worked with a vendor to use an iPhone camera for scanning and had to do a lot of innovation to make it work for our use-cases. This worked so well that we did not buy external scanners for more than 50% of users and rolled our camera scanning to them,” says Venkat.

Security was key to this app and PepsiCo “brought in Okta as our authentication solution and used it to authenticate the user at all layers. Moving all the systems in our ecosystem to Okta was a major accomplishment. This helped in single sign-on for going between apps as well as calling APIs with other systems,” the CIO says.

Delivering business benefits on the back of innovation

The state-of-the-art SalesHub+ helps PFNA’s 25,000-plus frontline users operate more than 18,000 routes in North America, and it has delivered to PepsiCo’s bottom line as well, largely in time savings that free up employees to drive more sales.

“This app saves the retail sales representative at least 20 minutes with the speed of the printer,” Venkat says, adding that it also reduces sync times dramatically. A full data sync used to take 20 to 30 minutes on an old device. It takes less than a minute with SalesHub+, which Venkat says is a huge time saver for the retail sales representative who can do more important work during this or sign off early instead of waiting to sync.

The project has also digitized Department of Transportation compliance paperwork, driving additional time savings for employees “along with millions of dollars in paper savings,” Venkat says. The solution’s mobile banking feature also saves PepsiCo about $5 million in mailing fees and by reducing the float time of cash significantly, he adds.

Visualizations of each store’s product displays, called planograms, are also helping facilitate sales, Venkat says. “The users now have visibility to the planograms of stores and can see the images of the products that they want to order. Using these two features, orders become a lot more accurate and increase in sales. A conservative estimate for adhering to the planogram would increase about 1% of the sales,” he says.