Lion builds an app to detect its beers on tap in venues

Lion has built a computer vision app to allow its sales team to automatically record how many taps at pubs serve its beers, ensuring the venue is meeting its contractual requirements.

The ‘Lion Pub Crawl’ app was built using SAP’s low-code/no-code Business Technology Platform (BTP) and AWS Rekognition.

It is integrated with Lion’s SAP-based customer relationship management system C4C, which stands for ‘cloud for customer’. 

Head of enterprise applications Jamie Grande told AWS Summit Sydney that the app came together at an SAP BTP hackathon organised by the SAP Australian User Group or SAUG.

It won both the hackathon as well as a Kirin global innovation award. Kirin is a Japanese beverage maker that owns Lion.

Grande said there were two internally focused use cases that initially drove the app’s development.

“The first is that we found our sales team, when they go into the pubs, after doing their sales, they actually have to go to the taps and take note of what Lion products are on tap. Then they have to go back to the office and enter this information because we need to capture, for example, that our venues are actually meeting our contractual requirement of actually putting Lion products on tap,” Grande said.

“We wanted to improve the way our sales team actually capture information, so we removed that manual process for them to reduce the incorrect entries and make it faster for them to actually capture real information about our beer products.”

A second use case for the app is to help Lion employees locate “preferred venues” to hold company events.

According to a slide deck [pdf] prepared for an SAP summit in Sydney in early April, prior to the app, “there [was] no easy way for Lion employees to determine which venue is a Lion preferred venue.”

“Lion employees should book Lion preferred venues for company events,” it states.

All up, the Pub Crawl app took 10 days to build. 

Grande said the project showed what could be achieved with a mix of technologies, not just technology from a single ecosystem.

Case in point, she said that the suggestion to use Rekognition came from SAP itself.

“When we joined the SAP BTP hackathon, we told SAP about our idea, and they said to us … ‘you’re better off using AWS Rekognition’,” Grande said.

“At the end of the day, we can’t force, for example, SAP AI capabilities to do the same work – it will require us to do a lot of custom development work – so having AWS Rekognition do this for us really expedited the whole application development process.”

With large manufacturing and distribution operations, Lion is heavily SAP-oriented. 

In the past month, the company went live with RISE with SAP, the name the vendor gives to an “AI-powered cloud ERP” that is based on S/4HANA cloud private edition.

Grande suggested that the Pub Crawl app could also be useful in consumer contexts – to increase brand recognition and sales, and to get people to try different Lion-owned beers.

“We try to increase foot traffic into our Lion venues by actually letting our consumers know [which] venues serve [their] favourite Lion beer,” Grande said.

“We [also] want to get to know our consumers more – what are their beer preferences? This app will help us capture what these are. 

“Also, hopefully, our consumers get to try other beer types. Sometimes you go to a pub and keep ordering the same beer, and this app will help [prompt consumers]: ‘Why don’t you give Tooheys a try if you’ve always been drinking XXXX or Heineken?”

The consumer version, according to the slide deck, appears to use AI services from SAP, as well as Azure OpenAI, in its architecture, and goes by the name Joey, according to a news report.

iTnews wasn’t able to confirm at the time of publication if the consumer version of the app is available to download.