By using Siebel eConsumer Goods to manage its data, P&G is able to more easily deliver product information in a standardized format to Transora, a consumer packaged goods industry exchange. Retailers using the same standards can plug into Transora and download product data. This standards-based data sharing lets P&G efficiently deliver precise product information uniformly to its retailers - no easy task given the U.S. market is home to seven varieties of Tide, at least 10 other P&G laundry products, and more than 20 other major categories, such as pet food and oral hygiene.

It's hard to overstate the significance of this uniform delivery. "For global customers, rather than seeing four or five different faces of P&G, and different outputs from those systems, they're getting consistent output no matter what country it's coming from," says Butler. Using industry standards reduces the time-consuming process of filling out forms for both P&G and retailers. It also reduces errors in the retailers' data catalogs, each of which can cost up to $100 to fix. And Butler says that P&G can get a new item to the shelves days and even weeks faster than in the past. "That's a big deal in a competitive environment," he says.

Looking Ahead

One of the company's biggest challenges, according to Verrijssen, will be accelerating CRM efforts at an appropriate speed while making sure P&G is implementing solutions that will work in all corners of the world. "There is a borderline - call it the 'golden road' - between complete standardization, which is easiest from an IT perspective, and having everybody do what they want," says Verrijssen. "I think we've found a good balance."

The key to P&G's CRM implementation, and what makes it different from anything the company has tried in the past, is the fact that the local offices can do what they want with CRM as long as they use the basic Siebel platform. "We have a philosophy of adoption versus rollout," says Butler. "Rollout is kind of a check-the-box mentality - Hey, the system's out there, you've got it, go. Adoption is more of a philosophy of really understanding the business need and then adapting the tool to fit that business need so that people embrace the tools and start using them to drive their business." The plan, then, isn't to foist technology on places that don't need it, but to address local business needs with a single platform whose combination of flexibility and standardization will eventually enable global data sharing. "Typically, anything that sounds global gets rejected," says Butler. By helping local offices use CRM to speak to specific needs, P&G hopes to avoid that automatic rejection.

As P&G moves ahead with its CRM efforts, it plans more elaborate uses of the technology. For example, the company is working on an electronic dashboard, powered by Siebel's eAnalytics technology, which Scott calls "the next level of capability." The idea is to help P&G management keep tabs on the status of P&G initiatives around the globe. Having a single CRM platform, of course, makes it possible to roll up data from every market to create a truly big-picture management tool. If all is well, the dashboard will show green. Potential problem areas - if, for example, a promotion is underselling its objective or the company fails to reach target distribution in certain locales or for certain products - will show red on the dashboard and give managers access to details. "If one of your key indicators is out of whack, you want to be able to drill down and understand what's out of whack and why, and what you can do to correct it," says Scott. P&G hopes this window into the health of the business will allow the company to react more quickly to business changes. "Traditionally, that's been a pain because we had different platforms and data wasn't always available," says Verrijssen.