How AI-led transformation helped a major brewer grow

When your brand is built on almost 150 years of tradition, you approach change carefully. In 2021, brewery giant Asahi Europe & International had bold ambitions for the future, but determining how to achieve them was the dilemma facing leaders, including Andrew Bailey, CFO; Bhuvan Panwar, Head of Emerging Technologies; and Matthew Jipps, Group Revenue Management Director.

It was an exciting time for the Japan-based company, which operates 19 breweries across nine markets in eight European countries and the US. Several major acquisitions in quick succession, aimed to strengthen Asahi’s presence in Europe, and better meet changing customer needs, through products such as non-alcoholic and premium beverages.

But while M&A brought opportunities for growth, it also created challenges. Each new business brought different processes, customized SAP systems and data silos, which created friction that threatened to dilute the potential of expansion. Meanwhile the company, like other fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) organizations, faced the headwinds of global volatility, shifting consumer expectations and evolving regulation.

Instead of tackling each challenge in isolation, Asahi’s leaders wanted to embark on broader transformation, building an agile, digitally driven operating model to strengthen resilience, empower teams and help the company move into a new chapter. “We wanted to position Asahi as a visionary leader. But we had to find the right partners in this journey,” said Panwar.

Knowing that transformation would require orchestrated efforts across technology, people and processes, Asahi turned to EY teams, partly because of the firm’s ability to work seamlessly with extensive ecosystem alliance partners including SAP and Microsoft.

Alex Hanmer, EY Engagement Leader for Asahi Europe & International, explained how the project came together. “EY brought the experience and outside-in view, Microsoft brought leading technology and Asahi brought the ambition,” he says.

From day one, all three were aligned around Asahi’s agenda for transformation, says Jessie Qin, EY Client Serving Partner for Asahi Europe & International. “We were very much focused on collaborating with the ecosystem to achieve this. We had a common goal and a common vision so that we could all bring our best to Asahi's success.”

Forming an ongoing, outcomes-based managed services partnership with EY teams made sense, because it gave Asahi leaders the confidence of working side-by-side with a strategic collaborator on what would be an ongoing long-term transformational journey, rather than a transactional project.

Revenue Growth Management (RGM) was an early target for transformation. Managing revenue growth is the lifeblood of any FMCG company, with trade promotion optimization (TPO) particularly crucial. “The ability to accurately forecast the impact of different investment decisions on sales is key to competitive advantage,” explains Bailey. Timely TPO insight allows companies to adapt quickly to new trends and breaking events.

But it’s becoming more difficult to capture and analyze this data. Supply and demand volatility is rising, consumer behavior shifts rapidly and promotional campaigns are more complex.

Asahi’s teams were doing their best to keep pace, but manual processes stymied their ability to extract insights. “We were working in spreadsheets across markets and that worked, but it took a lot of time and a lot of people’s effort. One big opportunity was to speed up the process and get to outcomes — and better conversations — faster," says Jipps.

“A small difference in efficiency and effectiveness around trade gives you a disproportionate return,” adds Bailey.

Together with the Asahi team, EY teams co-designed an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled TPO tool, with three connected intelligent capabilities: descriptive, which analyzes RGM data to reveal sales and promotion drivers; prescriptive, which uses those insights to generate recommendations and sales plans; and predictive, which uses data to forecast the impact of sales activity on revenue. Built on EY’s RGM framework and powered by the machine learning capabilities of Microsoft’s cloud-based Azure platform, the tool is tailored to support each of the brewer’s multiple markets and easily integrates with customized SAP environments.

Hamner says the magic of the tool, which also leverages EY consumer commercial analytics platform, is its high degree of sophistication. “It combines complex, multi-layered data sets to show how different factors impact sales and the effectiveness of promotional spend. Beyond point-of-sale data, this included weather patterns, trading restrictions and regional differences, and used AI, automation and analytics to completely transform forecasting and commercial decision-making.”

Design professionals from EY Studio+ helped create an intuitive interface that encouraged everyday use. “The tool is only as good as the people who use it. This means making sure they know how to get the best out of it and knowing when it can be optimized or evolved. It’s a symbiosis between tools and people,” says Hamner.

Together the EY and Asahi teams continued to refine the tool, with Bailey citing the commitment to ongoing development as a key success factor. Qin says the experience highlights the importance of a close partnership. “The EY-Asahi relationship is not transactional; it’s built on open conversations that help navigate challenges and foster collaboration."

The ability to gain much deeper insights at speed has changed the game, says Jipps. “Using automation lets us look at all promotions, not just the biggest ones. We can quickly see what’s working and what’s not. The technology brings all the data together, from in-store placement to competitor activity, so we can understand what drives performance. The descriptive ability, prescriptive and predictive modelling all happen at speed — something that wasn’t possible with spreadsheets.”

Sales teams could now easily access insights they can act on immediately. One example came from Romania.

“They were able to look at hundreds of promotions — big and small — and within 24 hours produce a full list of analysis and recommendations we could take to the customer. That’s when it starts to gain real traction,” Jipps says.

Panwar cites an example from Poland, where a paper voucher has been digitized with a low-code/no-code application.

“Because of this Microsoft-powered technology stack, we are able to ease the pain of sales field executives who used to carry the paper vouchers to the retailer store. They don’t have to do that anymore. With the click of a button, the voucher travels to the retailer, to the distributor, and back to the finance team for doing the audit and checks.”

He says that the benefits to sales teams have reverberated across the business. “When our sales teams are better informed, they make faster decisions and have more effective negotiations with our customers. This drives efficiency and growth for our customers, for us, and also optimizes costs.”

The tangible impact of transformation has built trust in the new system and helped overcome natural skepticism towards change.

“At the beginning there can be resistance,” admits Bailey. “People think the result wasn’t really driven by the tool, or that their own way is better. But the more our people use it, the more the trust grows. That helps as we take it market to market. You don’t want to be great in one place. You want to be consistently great.”

Jipps offers three reflections for leaders embarking on similar AI-enabled transformations: “First, start with where your business truly is. We went ambitious, implementing descriptive and prescriptive technology in one go. If I did it again, I’d probably build trust with descriptive first.

“Second, data challenges are harder than you think. You realize, not only that your data has issues, but that the data you were using before might not have been perfect either.

Even more importantly, Asahi leaders now feel they have the confidence, capabilities and collaborative partners to sustain growth, respond to changing market dynamics and achieve those bold ambitions.

Says Bailey: “We’ve been successful, and that breeds belief. This gives us confidence that the next time we're asking the business to come with us on something that's new and different, that we can bring our people with us.”