The Company
Pacific Bottleworks Co. is a Canadian beverage company that has been building, importing and distributing uniquely crafted ready-to-drink beverages since 2004. Through its hybrid distribution model—combining direct distribution with a network of regional partners—Pacific Bottleworks provides coast-to-coast coverage and can reach customers throughout Canada. The company offers the capabilities and national reach of a much larger organization while remaining nimble and quick to execute.
The company operates on two tracks: working with beverage brands and supply partners from Canada, the United States and other international markets, and selling its own proprietary brands across Canada and into the U.S. PBC uses multiple routes to market, including direct sales and delivery, third-party distributors, grocery, foodservice, convenience, independent retail and direct-chain accounts.
Over two decades, they’ve built a successful business with a diverse portfolio, strong national distribution capabilities and years of experience building emerging beverage categories. As more and more people move away from alcoholic beverages, Pacific Bottleworks Co. is holding ground in the space with tasty and satisfying alternatives like energy tea, organic fruit soda, cold brew coffee, and raw authentic kombucha.
The Challenge
With products moving through multiple routes to market across the country, keeping on top of what was selling and how individual accounts were performing required a PBC employee to pull reports and gather the data into one place.
Getting these answers meant pulling data from SAP Business One and manually formatting it into reports that sales reps and customers could actually use.
Apart from being incredibly time-consuming, the reports reflected data from the moment they were pulled only and were out of date by the next day. Other employees who also needed information from the reports had to go through the person responsible for pulling them, creating an undeniable bottleneck to the process.
In addition, “out the door” sales performance numbers (the numbers that distributors were selling) were unavailable, and leadership had no consolidated and streamlined view of what was selling in retail stores. Incoming data arrived from multiple distributors across the country, in different formats and with no real rhyme or reason. Reconciling this information became another time-consuming task.
The Solution
If information was going to become easier for employees to request, it was equally important that data governance and privacy stayed top of mind. The system was built privacy-first, with data governance and permissions forming a core part of the architecture from day one.
First, Aech engineers created custom agents that connected directly with PBC’s Business One database to cleanly automate five core business health reports from start to finish. This meant that rather than relying on one person to manually pull the reports and then distribute them, anyone in the company could request them through email or Teams, delivered in real time and with up-to-the-minute internal SAP numbers.
The need to track down the person who knew how to pull the report, wait for them to become available, or manually piece the information together vanished altogether, along with the 20+ extra hours spent pulling the reports.
Once the internal performance reports were automated, Aech could perform a similar process with the distributor data.
Data and the individual formats they arrived in were ingested, normalized, mapped, and deduplicated (so if two distributors both sold to a grocer in Canmore, it showed as one customer).
The result was a single consolidated view of retail performance across the country. PBC can now look up how a specific product is performing at a specific store in any Canadian city and generate that report - also on demand and with the latest available distributor data.
“The reaction from the team was immediate. I had employees telling me they wished they’d had this ability at prior companies they worked at, which were much larger in scale.”
The Results
With custom agents doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes, PBC has turned fragmented business data into something the entire team can actually use—giving them faster answers, real-time visibility into internal SAP data and access to the latest available distributor data, and a clearer picture of what’s happening across the business, without sacrificing privacy.
Twenty-plus hours of manual reporting disappeared. The bottleneck disappeared with it. And the information PBC needs to move quickly and make better decisions is now just an email or Teams message away.