Procter & Gamble: Interactive Production Management

Cincinnati, Ohio-based Procter & Gamble Co. (P&G) has one of the world’s strongest portfolios of consumer products, including such well-known brands as Pampers, Tide, Crest, Duracell, Olay and Gillette. P&G employs approximately 135,000 people in about 80 countries. For fiscal year 2009 the company reported sales of more than $76 billion.

After finding it difficult to manage its interactive marketing production, P&G charged Accenture with launching and managing all digital marketing campaigns and activities for P&G’s brands around the world.

Recently, P&G set out to extend its marketing campaigns to the fast-emerging network of digital distribution channels such as the Internet and mobile phones. While P&G’s new focus on digital marketing was successful and popular among the brand teams, the demand for interactive production management support grew so fast that the company found it increasingly difficult to manage these services in an integrated and consistent manner on a global scale.

P&G transferred all functional responsibilities of its interactive production managers to Accenture for three years. In its new capacity, the Accenture team acted as the execution arm of P&G’s digital marketing strategy teams and was charged with launching and managing all digital marketing campaigns and activities for P&G’s brands around the world.

Approximately 10 percent of the project’s workforce is now located at client sites in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Warsaw, Poland. The balance of resources has been deployed through the Accenture Global Delivery Network and, specifically, the Accenture Delivery Centers in Mumbai, India; Shanghai, China; and Buenos Aires, Argentina.

To date, the Accenture team has assumed execution responsibilities for 65 digital marketing programs and offers interactive production support in English, Spanish, Russian, Italian, Mandarin, Korean and Japanese. The contract will remain in force through August 31, 2011.

The P&G and Accenture arrangement has garnered high marks from P&G’s brand teams and has consistently exceeded service level agreement requirements. Over the three-year contract period, P&G expects to significantly reduce costs associated with interactive production management.

Equally important, the solution is allowing P&G to establish a high-quality, globally consistent digital marketing capability that can grow and adapt to support additional brand teams over time, transforming the way business is done.