As a beverage program manager, what’s the key element to effectively assess your multi-locational purchasing activities? It’s none other than, you guessed it, data.
Regardless of the monitoring techniques you use, insight into multi-locational purchasing data empowers your team to:
- Understand ordering behaviors
- Seamlessly address anomalies
- Identify the most competitive items for your approved list
- Streamline purchasing oversight
- Boost productivity
- Reduce operational costs
- Improve decision-making
However, it’s not easy to get what you want in bev alc. Conventional monitoring systems present challenges that don’t help you see the big picture of your multi-locational purchasing activities.
The hurdles that affect your business include:
- Legacy systems: Reliance on unmodernized technology
- Manual processing: Labor-intensive, time-consuming tasks
- Siloed inaccessible data: Disconnected data across multiple systems
- Transparency and trust issues: Essential base within any organization to align expectations
So, how do these barriers prevent you from increasing and sustaining beverage program compliance?
#1 Legacy systems
Relying heavily on legacy systems means only one thing: Your data is likely incomplete, inaccurate, or just too complex to make sense of. Such reliance delays analysis, decision-making, and action, all of which affect your bottom line.
More specifically, beverage program managers still stick to legacy systems because of:
- Significant resistance to adopting new tech
- Cost of transitioning
- Fear of upgrading
- Insufficient technical expertise
- Inability to see the long-term value
- Uncertainty about how to innovate
Interesting fact: Modernizing your legacy system reduces business operations by 13% and increases revenue by 14%, according to a recent study.
Although it’s hard to say goodbye to traditional methods, it’s even more crucial to deploy the right tech to stay competitive in this bev alc landscape.
#2 Manual data processing
Manual data processing takes up a lot of time for beverage program managers, which gets worse when managing 20, 30 or 50+ locations. This is not only inefficient, but also tedious for everyone involved. It also distracts your team from performing other equally critical tasks, which leads to:
- Work burnout
- Job dissatisfaction
- Poor productivity
Interesting fact: A recent executive study found that 37 percent of respondents spent anywhere from 61 to 80% of their time preparing data instead of analyzing and discussing insights. The survey TDWI Best Practices Report: Improving Data Preparation for Business Analytics also found that 28% of those participants spent 41 to 60% of their time doing the same.
Such outcomes only hurt your business and won’t help you get the job done. The best way to stay on top of your multi-locational purchasing activities is to help your team move faster to action with a modern method that streamlines monotonous tasks, decreases risk for errors, and amplifies management talents.
#3 Siloed inaccessible data
The alcohol beverage industry faces data fragmentation throughout the 3-tier network. Such fragmentation impedes effective communication between suppliers, distributors, and retailers, creating data silos. When confronted with siloed inaccessible data, beverage program managers struggle to:
- See the full picture of their business
- Achieve cross-tier collaboration and negotiate better contracts
- Include the most competitive items on their approved list of products
This lack of visibility causes beverage program managers to increasingly rely on gutfeel or guesswork to oversee and adjust their purchasing activities - a common business practice that boosts inefficiencies and degrades compliance.
One way you can solve this is through Fintech’s Beverage Program Management solution, it helps you break data barriers across the industry, enabling you to see:
- What’s been purchased across all locations
- Where compliance falls behind
- Which items are most purchased
- Which items add the greatest value to your program
#4 Transparency and trust issues
Gaining insight into what’s happening in your program is key to better oversight and increased compliance. It helps keep everyone, including vendors, on the same page about what you are trying to accomplish with your program. If your system doesn’t provide you with full visibility into your purchasing activities, you might struggle to:
- Establish transparent negotiations
- Build trust across the network
By prioritizing data-driven monitoring methods, you can gain a full understanding of how each location’s purchasing activities align with your purchasing mandates and what you need to ensure all your locations remain compliant. This, in turn, helps you:
- Foster meaningful discussions with your team
- Create transparent negotiations
- Cultivate cross-tier collaboration and coordination
Interesting fact: According to the Harvard Business Review, 60% of procurement leaders reported that a lack of transparency among finance, purchasing managers, and vendors is a huge business risk.
With such evidence in mind, gaining full visibility into your purchasing activities helps you bridge data gaps, reconcile expectations, and ensure all your locations understand what’s needed to succeed in beverage program management.
Conclusion
Keeping track of your purchasing activities is key to increasing compliance and running better beverage programs. With data making all the difference in bev alc, you can no longer rely on traditional methods to manage your beverage programs as they fail to keep up with today’s business landscape.
Instead, focus on data-driven, automated methods to gain full visibility into what’s being purchased across all locations and what’s needed to ensure compliance. Say goodbye to old-school legacy systems, tedious manual data processing, data gaps, and transparency issues impacting your success in bev alc.
Discover your untapped potential and drive exceptional results with your beverage program.
Using Fintech’s beverage program management solution, you can:
- Simplify your purchasing oversight
- Increase team productivity
- Create consistent customer experiences
- Reduce operational costs
- Make data-driven decisions
- Increase your program’s competitiveness
Learn more or request a demo below.
