Jelly Belly Candy Company: eCommerce Website

In less than 10 weeks, Accenture and Microsoft launched a totally new JellyBelly.com. Since then, orders have increased by 35 percent. The Accenture Managed Internet Service for Microsoft® .NET comprehensively manages all aspects of the e-business lifecycle from design and build, to testing and deployment, to Web hosting and application management.

Started in 1898 by two young brothers who immigrated to the United States from Germany, the Jelly Belly Candy Company has evolved from manufacturing only butter creams and candy corn to marketing the world-famous Jelly Belly candy. The privately held company based in Fairfield, California, today sells candies in 35 countries worldwide, and is a favorite of celebrities and politicians as well as regular folks.

Jelly Belly recently secured the US rights to manufacture and distribute Harry Potter Bertie Bott's Every Flavor jelly beans, including such unusual flavors as Grass, Black Pepper and Sardine. As the release of the first Harry Potter movie approached in November 2001, it became obvious that Jelly Belly's online storefront couldn't handle the high volume of transactions expected from the Harry Potter merchandising deal. The existing website couldn't show customers a history of their orders, nor could it remember their favorite flavors or let them ship their purchases to more than one address. The entire ordering process was cumbersome and frequently timed out before users had completed their purchases.

"Customers complained bitterly," says Ryan Schader, Jelly Belly's director of corporate strategy. "The poor performance really had a negative impact on our brand." Customers' dissatisfaction resulted in a high volume of negative calls and e-mail, as well as lost sales. Jelly Belly needed an innovative solution that would help build brand awareness and better handle online sales. The company also wanted to:

• Create a customer portal that could be tailored to each customer's buying habits.
  
  
• Create a foundation for building a business-to-business solution for its core wholesale business, which serves thousands of gourmet candy retailers and mass merchandisers.
  
  
• Tie the sales process on the site to its enterprise planning and warehouse management systems.
  
  
• Let customers view online order and shipment information, while enabling company personnel to track order fulfillment.

Jelly Belly decided to upgrade its eCommerce platform—comprehensively, and immediately. With less than three months before the release of the movie and no viable solution on the table, Jelly Belly selected a joint offering from Accenture and Microsoft. "In terms of return on investment, speed to market and reliability, no one else even came close to the solution that Microsoft and Accenture were able to provide for us," says Schader.

Accenture and its alliance partner, Microsoft, provided an innovative end-to-end solution for Jelly Belly: the Microsoft® Solution for Internet Business for Web development, and the Accenture Managed Internet Service for hosting and managing the e-commerce site. No other offering provided the basic commerce functions off the shelf. And no other offering provided such strong vendor support with such a significant added convenience—a single point of contact and ongoing application management of the solution.

The Microsoft Solution for Internet Business (MSIB) represents a new, pre-integrated approach to delivering a comprehensive Internet business solution. MSIB takes advantage of the power of the Microsoft .NET Enterprise Server family to deliver the functionality needed to build a powerful and dynamic Internet presence. With MSIB, a company like Jelly Belly can quickly and cost-effectively build an Internet presence that can be customized to meet the unique needs of their organization.

Next to quick deployment, Jelly Belly was most concerned about enabling a complete solution with guaranteed reliability and a single point of contact. Accenture was able to fulfill this need with its Managed Internet Service, a package that provides small to large enterprises with end-to-end management of any or all parts of their Internet business life cycle.

The Microsoft Solution for Internet Business (MSIB) pre-integrates several of Microsoft's .NET Enterprise Server products:

• Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server
• Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition
• Microsoft Commerce Server 2000
• Microsoft Content Management Server 2001

The extensible Microsoft solution allowed the team to integrate the e-commerce front end with Jelly Belly's CIMPRO enterprise system and its Swisslog warehouse management and fulfillment system.

A team that included Accenture, Microsoft Consulting Services and Jelly Belly quickly mobilized, determined the key project requirements and developed an action plan. Jelly Belly's location—in Fairfield, California, an hour north of San Francisco—enabled the team to work together out of the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) in Mountain View, where all the design, coding and testing for the project was performed.

By working alongside the Microsoft Consulting Services and Microsoft Technology Center team members throughout the project, Accenture was able to leverage the development experience to support its role of providing application hosting and ongoing operations support for the new site.

Accenture quickly tailored the Managed Internet Service offering to meet the needs of the MSIB platform and Jelly Belly. Accenture's methodologies, solution components, joint project development involvement, and expertise on the Microsoft platform enabled the team to rapidly deliver a solution for Jelly Belly. Within three weeks of signing the hosting and management contract with Jelly Belly, Accenture was able to procure, configure and deploy Jelly Belly's staging and production environments.

The Accenture Managed Internet Service for Microsoft® .NET comprehensively manages all aspects of the eBusiness lifecycle, from design and build, to testing and deployment, to Web hosting and application management. Built on Microsoft .NET Enterprise Servers and the Avanade Connected Architecture, Accenture Managed Internet Service supports the entire spectrum of Internet business, from Web publishing to portals to virtual storefronts and comprises the most comprehensive set of integrated, pre-built solutions available today.

Today, Accenture provides application hosting, 24/7 management of the site, proactive monitoring, help desk support and guaranteed service levels. Acting as a single point of accountability, Accenture manages all of Jelly Belly's solution components and third-party vendors, eliminating that complexity for Jelly Belly.

"A lot of outsourcing firms say that they host websites and run e-business solutions," says Dan Rosman, Jelly Belly's IT director. "Anybody can run a server and a network, but it's the application that means everything to our business. Accenture really provides the end-to-end hosting solution we were looking for."

Having a complete solution—including outsourced management of that solution—lets Jelly Belly concentrate on making great candy rather than on running its website. "We would have had to add six to eight people to have the technical skills on staff needed to manage a reliable, 24-hour operation. We didn't want to do that," Rosman says. "We're a candy company, not an IT company."

In fact, many companies only need Internet business solution resources for a short time. Using a managed service enables companies like Jelly Belly to avoid the time and expense of building an internal IT staff to support such a project.

In less than 10 weeks, JellyBelly.com was up and running. Microsoft and Accenture not only prepared the candy maker for the Harry Potter blitz, but also the peak December holiday period. Since the new JellyBelly.com was launched, orders have increased by 35 percent. What's more, the revamped e-commerce site boasts new capabilities that would have been impossible with the earlier site. For example, users can sign up for the Taste Bud Club and receive personalized content and targeted campaigns such as the opportunity to be among the first to sample new flavors.

Jelly Belly realized significant cost savings by leveraging the MTC pre-built development environment rather than buying its own hardware and software. A competitive pricing structure allowed Jelly Belly to spread its capital investments over time, reducing the one-time charges that can often break a budget. Further, Accenture's integrated assets and existing service management platforms meant that other cost savings were passed on to Jelly Belly.

The joint Microsoft and Accenture solution is now paving the way for Jelly Belly's core business-to-business solution. Plans are on the drawing board to create a portal through which sales managers could securely manage their catalogs and price lists for gourmet and specialty candy shops and large mass merchandisers, such as Wal-Mart, Kmart, Target, and Ross.

The alliance between Accenture and Microsoft enabled both organizations to bring the best each had to offer as a seamless team to launch the new JellyBelly.com. As a result, Jelly Belly received a cutting-edge solution quickly, and at a reasonable cost. Jelly Belly easily handled the new business from adoring Harry Potter fans and today is well positioned for future growth.