BJ’s Wholesale Club Aims to
Increase Its Customer Base
with SAP Sales Cloud
An Interview with Chandra Marubadu and Prakash Bodicherla
A Look at BJ’s Wholesale Club
If you have a business specializing
in groceries or general merchandise
including apparel, housewares, office
equipment, and small appliances,
you probably are familiar with BJ’s
Wholesale Club.
As an operator of 216 membership-
based warehouse clubs in 16 states
along the East Coast of the United
States, BJ’s serves more than 5
million members and generates more
than $12.5 billion in annual revenue.
As it looked to grow by improving
the buying journey for its business-
to-business (B2B) customers, BJ’s
needed new technology that it could
use to turn data into insights while
delivering more effective incentives to
its sales team.
Look to the Clouds…It’s a
Solution
The wholesale club was running on a
legacy spreadsheet-based system that
was no longer scalable and could not
Photo courtesy of BJ’s Wholesale Club
support its growth goals. In addition to
supporting those goals, the new solution
would need to integrate with the
company’s existing SAP ERP Sales and
Distribution (SD) module. “SAP Sales
Cloud provided integration accelerators
with prebuilt connection logic, which
reduced the time and cost needed to
go from design to production,” said
Chandra Marubadu, senior manager,
SAP at BJ’s Wholesale Club.
From a system perspective, it provided
a competitive set of features and
options compared with other CRM
solutions. Marubadu added that, “SAP
Sales Cloud was the only solution that
provided a similar look and feel to the
SAP Fiori visualization screens that our
sales team had already been using.
This consistency between our existing
and new systems helped us reduce the
training time for our end users.”
Buckle up the Data
BJ’s was operating on an SAP ECC
system, which ran all B2B purchases
through a sales and distribution flow
using a standard master data process.
The plan was to migrate the B2B
customer data to an SAP Cloud for
Customer (C4C) solution.
SAP Sales Cloud was
the only solution that
provided a similar
look and feel to the
SAP Fiori visualization
screens that our sales
team had already been
using.
— Chandra Marubadu,
Senior Manager, SAP,
BJ’s Wholesale Club
There were no major challenges
aside from not being able to match
international region codes, which
caused failures during the migration
progress. “The solution was to maintain
translation (code values) in C4C to
match the ECC values,” said Prakash
Bodicherla, SAP retail solution architect.
The team also needed to add some new
entries in SAP ECC to sync with C4C.
“The easy part was to migrate
complete account management
design from SAP ECC to C4C, but
some accounts in SAP ECC had data
that was not properly maintained,
so the cleanup was a bit challenging
and led to some difficulty during the
integration,” Bodicherla added.
The wholesale club worked with
Bridge-X Technologies Inc. for the new
system implementation. “We were
able to complete the design, build,
and testing phases, along with the
production rollout, in a 15-week time
frame,” Marubadu said.
1
All Aboard, We’re Riding
the Cloud
BJ’s knew it needed a game plan
for introducing the system and the
new ways of doing business that
came with it. It planned to gain buy-in
from all parties that were involved
and to prepare the appropriate
amount of training.
“We knew some sales reps were
concerned that a formal CRM tool
would create a feeling of being
micromanaged,” Marubadu said. “We
engaged the sales reps throughout
the entire process to address their
concerns, starting with the design.”
Join us Oct. 2–3 in Phoenix for the
Consumer Industries Forum to learn how
your peers are using technology to meet
customer expectations.
One System, One Truth This has been a huge
win for the team and
As its B2B business grew to 1,400 has greatly increased
customers, BJ’s was challenged with productivity by
converting its fragmented business allowing sales reps to
deliver quotes much
data. The retailer aimed to consolidate
faster than in the past.
all its customer master data and
— Chandra Marubadu,
contact information into one system Senior Manager, SAP,
with the goal of selling more, faster. BJ’s Wholesale Club

Accelerating Sales Changes
BJ’s trained most teams in less
than three weeks. It took a phased
approach by training super users first,
and then a select group of the sales
reps and managers who had shown
interest in being early adopters. The
remaining sales reps and managers
were trained last to make sure
the entire sales population was
comfortable using the new system.
“There are always some slow adopters
with any system change,” Marubadu
said. “We were moving from essentially
using paper to a true CRM tool, so we
anticipated that hurdle. The ongoing
adoption challenge we face is with
driving behavior to make sure users are
logging leads, contacts, and activities
and then following up within the SAP
Sales Cloud system. This situation is
not unique to BJ’s or to SAP Sales
Cloud. We were fully aware that this
project would require a considerable
amount of change management to be
successful over the long term.”
We engaged the sales reps throughout the entire process
to address their concerns, starting with the design.
— Chandra Marubadu, Senior Manager, SAP, BJ’s Wholesale Club
Before moving to SAP Sales Cloud,
BJ’s did not have a smooth process to
manage its internal customer master
data. The retailer required multiple
teams to manually key redundant data
into its systems. “It usually took one to
five hours to create or edit a customer,”
Marubadu said. “After the data was
entered into the system, that was it.
There was nothing more that the user
could derive from that information.”
Goodbye Manual Processes,
Hello New Customers
SAP Sales Cloud provided one place
to not only store all customer data,
but also to learn how to engage
with it. The B2B sales team gained
customer insights by creating a
central repository for all leads and
prospects, which brought new
visibility to its remote teams through
reporting and sales operations data.
Sales team members now have
standard success metrics and real-
time access to customer data, which
has helped reduce manual processes.
Since the implementation, BJ’s B2B
sales team has full access to customer
data with the ability to add new and
update existing customers in real
time from anywhere. “This has been a
huge win for the team and has greatly
increased productivity by allowing
sales reps to deliver quotes much
faster than in the past,” Marubadu said.
The View from up Here
BJ’s is still in the process of
understanding the full capabilities of
SAP Sales Cloud. “We intend to use
these tools to find additional growth
opportunities with our existing
customers,” Marubadu added.
“Because we were moving from a
nonsystemic solution, we intentionally
decided to turn on limited SAP
Sales Cloud features. We have not
yet introduced sales planning and
forecasting,” Marubadu noted. Both
features are on the road map for
2019. To get more from SAP Sales
Cloud, BJ’s is looking at adding SAP’s
sales performance management and
incentive compensation tools.

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