Beverage Distribution
Modernizing order operations: real-time fulfillment, eliminating order rework
A leading U.S. beverage distributor faced the challenge of order-to-cash delays caused by unrealistic delivery promises, conflicting multi-rep order streams, and manual rework across 3,500 field reps, and turned to Liquid Analytics (AWS Partner) for a bespoke solution to move error prevention upstream and eliminate order rework entirely.
AWS Partner
Liquid Analytics
Results at a glance
Zero — delivery miscommitments
15 mins — order pipeline refresh
1 flow — field to fulfillment, no rework
Zero — orders against blocked accounts
The Challenge
Systemic delivery mis-commitments — lack of factory calendar visibility led reps to make unrealistic promises to customers.
Conflicting multi-rep streams — multiple reps for a single account created conflicting delivery requests.
Delayed data — poor propagation of credit blocks caused wasted warehouse effort.
Manual controlled-state re-entry — government systems required manual re-keying, causing errors and delays.
Invoices delayed by field errors — required corrections extended order-to-cash cycles and bloated AR aging.
How AWS Powers the Solution
This platform runs end-to-end on AWS, in a dedicated VPC kept separate from the distributor’s own AWS-hosted SAP and enterprise systems, connected via an encrypted AWS Site-to-Site VPN. Requests are queued and processed on Amazon EC2, where the core service coordinates writes to a six-node, self-managed Cassandra cluster (RF3, tolerating two node failures) and then to Amazon RDS PostgreSQL, run Multi-AZ for production resilience. Three Amazon SQS queues — items, permissions, and transactions — decouple ingestion from processing so spikes and failures stay isolated by workload type, while Amazon S3 absorbs overflow data too large to process inline. An internet-facing Elastic Load Balancer distributes client traffic across the fleet.
As an AWS Partner, Liquid Analytics used this architecture to eliminate order rework and deliver real-time fulfillment at scale.
The Results
Metric | Impact delivered |
|---|---|
Delivery accuracy | Real-time factory calendars for 3,500 reps ensure accurate delivery commitments and immediately fulfillable orders, eliminating manual corrections, callbacks, and resets — zero miscommitments by design. |
Pipeline cleanliness | Upstream SAP validation rejects orders for blocked or dormant accounts, eliminating wasted warehouse picks and order voids. |
Intraday visibility | 15-minute syncs provide live pipeline visibility, enabling intraday staging and eliminating end-of-batch scrambles. |
Multi-rep account coordination | Consolidates multi-rep orders into shared delivery windows, replacing fragmented submissions with account-consolidated sets. |
Market compliance | Isolates controlled-state market exceptions, containing re-entry burdens and protecting the standard fulfillment flow. |
“We have factory calendar delivery days for our customers — it’s not like you can just ship something that afternoon. Having that built into the order creation flow means our customers get the right date and our ops team isn’t managing the fallout from a bad commitment.”
— Sr. Manager, Sales Enablement Platform