Breakthru Beverage Uses E-commerce to Expand Distribution

For Breakthru Beverage Group, a leading North American distributor of the world’s top luxury and premium wine, spirits, and beer brands, the company’s core mission is to be the best and most assessable distributor in the industry to work with. The company operates 36 facilities (including more than 15 distribution centers) throughout all of Canada and 14 U.S. states.

Breakthru Beverage’s response to the impacts of the pandemic is helping to make its mission a reality. A transformation initiative was already underway prior to the pandemic, which enabled the company to pivot more successfully as demand and distribution patterns shifted. Joe Bruhin, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer for Breakthru Beverage, says the company greatly accelerated the design, development, and implementation of its e-commerce solution. Originally slated as a three-year plan, the company’s e-commerce initiative was completed in one year.

“We’re able to move fast and adapt to changing demand patterns because of our end-to-end SAP Commerce Cloud and SAP Customer Data Cloud solutions, as well as SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) for our ERP, which has helped us tremendously in meeting customer demand,” Bruhin says. “Our New Horizons project involved the harmonization of the company’s internal data into a single source of truth within SAP HANA. All the noise about the data not being accurate or inconsistent has been eliminated as a result of that initiative.”

Read this article and learn:
- How Breakthru Beverage expedited its transformation timeline through e-commerce;

- How BBG achieved a fully data integrated business with SAP at the core to drive insights, actions, and other capabilities is a true competitive advantage for the company;

- What Breakthru’s single integrated system looks like and the technologies that it’s leveraging.

- What the next phase looks like as the company implements all the technology into the cloud and integrates third-party data.