Lion Nathan(MIS100 2011)

Reports to: CFO
Size of IS shop: 75

PCs: 1550
Mobile PCs: 1300
Terminals: 400
Hand-held devices: 500
Total screens: 3750

Industry: Manufacturing
PC environment: HP; Dell; Windows XP, Vista
Server environment: Windows 2003, 2008; Linux; HP
DBMS: SQL, Oracle, Progress
Address: Level 7, 68 York Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia; and 111 Carlton Gore Road, Newmarket, Auckland
Website: www.lion-nathan.com
Key IS projects this year: Not disclosed.

In March Lion Nathan announced that it would remain at its current East Tamaki location to 2014. The beverage manufacturer and producer was taken over last year, in full, by Japanese brewer Kirin, which already had a 46 percent stake in the company.

While CIO Darryl Warren was unavailable to participate directly in this year’s MIS100, he recently participated in a roundtable discussion organised by MIS magazine in Australia. He talked about increased use of social networking tools, such as Facebook, that the brewer and beverage retailer is using to create unique customer experiences.

Lion Nathan’s sales force is outfitted with tablet computers through which they can access information via enabled 3G networks. “We have a focus on engagement with our employees and our customers. In the past few years we have developed a repository that captures all of the interactions from the customer relationship ­management system,” Warren told MIS. “If a customer has just placed an order through the contact centre, a member of the sales team that contacts that customer knows they have placed that order. Once it is shipped and delivered, that also goes into the repository. That single view of the customer, in whatever form it takes, is absolutely essential.”

Lion Nathan relies heavily on remote access for its staff and high functionality of audio and video solutions. It has worked extensively with key Microsoft partners over the past three years to roll out and maintain current versions of Exchange Server, Office Communications Server and Microsoft Office Live Meeting.