Case Studies

Launched American Express corporatecard/travel management services in Japan.

The card business generally began in earnest in the early 80’s following a relaxation in the law and Amex launched its Gold Card with immediate success, followed by Green and quickly grew to critical mass of approximately 1 million cards in force.

Using successful templates, systems and processes from other countries, we assembled a rapidly growing team of salespeople, supported by marketing, systems and operations experts led by expatriate specialists borrowed from overseas markets. Initially, foreign companies were early adopters, led by IBM and their 500 staff who had recently moved their Asia/Pacific HQ to Tokyo. Many cultural and market-specific problems had to be overcome, for example use of cash and absence of clear expense policies in most major Japanese companies. Today, and for well over a decade, cards have been used routinely for business travel, led by Amex as a pioneer in this sector.

Skills demonstrated:

Project management, new product development and launch, cross-cultural sensitivity, recruitment, resourcing and management of talent and infrastructure

Key deliverables and learnings:

Cost-effective launch of new product to a demanding timetable by adapting existing systems and processes from other markets; created a platform which served this important market for the next decade; overcame significant cultural challenges, thereby better understanding the overall market in Japan

Who is Universal Pictures International?

NBC Universal is one of the world’s leading media and entertainment companies in the development, production, and marketing of entertainment, news, and information to a global audience.

Universal Pictures creates and distributes theatrical and non-theatrical filmed entertainment – mainly through DVDs. A high quality and diverse product mix is delivered to the growing global marketplace through a variety of internally developed titles, co-productions, local acquisitions, specialty motion pictures, direct-to-video titles, specialty DVDs, classic titles, and consumer products. These films and DVDs then provide content for television, and further drive the recreation business, consumer products and other ancillary businesses.

What did we do?

UPIE is a highly creative organization in a very competitive marketplace. DVD sales and distribution is subject to many varying factors all influencing the profitability of the business.

Universal wished to harness and channel its intellectual capital to meet the aims of its parent company, the General Electric Corporation – to find innovative ways to stimulate its market and grow revenue.

Who is SABMiller?

SABMiller is one of the world’s largest brewers with brewing interests and distribution agreements across six continents. They own more than 200 brands including international premium brands such as Grolsch, Miller Genuine Draft, PilsnerUrquell plus leading regional brands. They are also one of the largest bottlers of Coca Cola products in the world.

Over the past 20 years they have grown rapidly from their original South African base into a global operation, developing a balanced and attractive portfolio of businesses. Their markets range from developed economies such as the USA to fast developing markets such as China and India.

What did we do?

Innovation and an appropriate stage-gate process were identified by the Senior Management Team as a major initiative that required a dedicated team for global implementation.

Their vision was to introduce a common innovation process for consumer facing initiatives – the Smart Gate process, in order to get new products to market at the right time in the most efficient manner. By achieving these goals, innovation became the primary driver for organic growth across all their businesses.

BBI’s international experience was critical to the global roll-out of this process and was a key ingredient to the successful implementation of the project.

Digital Media Strategy and Delivery

Over the last 15 years BBI consultants have delivered a multitude of services supporting the move to digital services for BBC and other media companies. Projects include:

• BBC Factual & Learning - Delivering a pilot service for the BBC national broadband eLearning solution to 30+ UK schools. The Digital Curriculum pilot enabled the BBC to gain DCMS approval for the £150m national roll-out.
• Capita - Multi-channel interactive commerce solution for TV Licensing operations supporting payments via online and iDTV applications. 
• 3UK - 3G content production and distribution platform now operational as ‘Content Factory’ for Hutchinson 3G.
• BBC News - Speech to Text solutions for data mining and Digital Archive integration for BBC News Television and Radio outputs.

Other Media Projects include: