Retail Distribution
Reimagining enterprise goal management: from fragmented spreadsheets to a unified commercial engine
A leading North American wine & spirits distributor faced the challenge of running commercial programs across dozens of disconnected spreadsheets and legacy tools, with no unified way to track performance-based compensation, and turned to Liquid Analytics for a bespoke solution to consolidate everything into a single enterprise commercial engine.
Results at a glance
27 to 1 — systems consolidated
28,000+ — daily active program goals
100% — platform uptime over 10+ years
40x — downstream impact: 300 users driving outcomes for 12,000+ sales professionals
The Challenge
Manual processes — tracking was managed in disconnected spreadsheets outside the core system.
Data mismatches — three separate products never aligned on tracking or payouts.
Inflexible tools — legacy systems did not support feature expansion, resulting in manual workarounds.
Incentive gaps — no unified platform existed to track performance-based compensation.
Scaling difficulties — legacy processes and apps could not complete scoring in time for daily reporting cutoffs.
How AWS Powers the Solution
This platform is built end-to-end on AWS. Liquid Analytics workloads run as containerized microservices on Amazon EKS and ECS/Fargate, scaling automatically behind Application Load Balancers secured with AWS WAF and TLS. Program data lives in Amazon RDS Aurora PostgreSQL, while high-volume tracking runs on DuckDB files staged on Amazon FSx for Lustre and synced to Amazon S3 as the system of record. Data exchange with the distributor flows through a serverless pipeline of Lambda, Step Functions, EventBridge, and SQS. A generative-AI layer on Amazon Bedrock pairs a Bedrock Knowledge Base (embedded with Amazon Titan) with an Anthropic Claude model to surface grounded, cited recommendations from the distributor’s own data, with every model call logged to CloudWatch for auditability.
As an AWS Partner, Liquid Analytics used this stack to scale to 28,000+ daily program goals with 100% platform uptime, without the distributor managing any infrastructure.
The Results
Before | After Liquid Decisions | Benefit |
|---|---|---|
27 Frankensteined tool variants across markets | Single enterprise product with standardized workflows across all 26+ markets | Enterprise standardization |
~65 to 70 suppliers tracked with basic programs | 7,000 active program trackers (~28,000 goals) running daily | 100x tracking capacity increase |
Programs tracked in side spreadsheets | All types unified — depletion, distribution, reorders, execution, imagery, points, and NSV | Eliminated spreadsheet chaos |
Overlay tracking split across 3 disconnected products | Person, route, responsibility, tracking, and payout in one system | Single source of truth |
300 direct users, limited reach | 300 users driving outcomes touching 12,000+ commercial professionals across the full commercial hierarchy | 40x downstream impact |
“We’ve been dealing with the same pain points for four or five years now. In a matter of days, you solved them for us.”
— VP Sales Operations
“The thought that truly went into how we should build what we need the product to do and then how you built the product — those were the two really big testaments.”
— VP Commercial Planning