As Peerless Beverage Company, a New Jersey beer distributor, has grown over the years, they have continually added more sophistication to their delivery processes. The next step in their growth plan was to enhance their client communications and move to a more proactive posture, where clients receive automated updates on scheduled deliveries.

Ideally, this initiative will reduce inbound calls to customer service and sales personnel, while also creating a more efficient delivery process. “Once I realized Enzo had the capabilities, I knew that we could do it faster, with more flexibility, and at a fraction of the cost,” said Jesse Robbins, Director of Information Technology.

Like many companies in the distribution space, Peerless relies on eoStar Route Accounting Software as their host system and main client management tool. The email capabilities provided by eoStar needed to be enhanced from an integration standpoint.

Peerless identified three main goals for their email initiative:

• Trigger-based automation to improve overall customer experience and manage expectations
• Ability to add dynamic information creating a more relevant, valuable communication tool
• Professional presentation of the email notifications, including corporate branding and support messaging

Data Management Challenges Included:

• Inability to Address In-house – Due to the nature of the project, the solution was anticipated to require custom code. Peerless technology services consists of just a few full-time employees (FTEs).
• Lack of Affordable Development Talent – After spending considerable budget on developers with limited results, Peerless ultimately decided it was better to manage critical infrastructure components with trusted employees and a stable, sustainable platform.
• Too Much for Traditional ODBC Development – Peerless experienced first- hand the limitations of traditional data integration methodologies, such as ODBC and ETL development, which are inefficient systems for handling modern data automation needs.
• Inability to Perform Rapid Testing – A hard-coded solution requires every element to be in place before testing can even begin. This proved to be one of the biggest challenges for Peerless in this project.
• Difficult to Update and Maintain Over the Long Term – Even the slightest of updates from any of the relevant data sets would require adjustments to the development code.

The Solution: Deploy an Automated Solution Quickly Using SQL and Enzo

Because Enzo makes all data easy to manage using SQL, Peerless was able to deploy and fine tune a brand-new solution within just a few weeks.

Since Enzo already had developed several of the integration adapters needed, Jesse and his team were able to write at least 70% of the full solution inhouse using SQL. Enzo provided additional integration support and worked with Peerless to create a few new adapters that would be needed. Once the adapters were available, it took just a few days to deploy a final solution and test.

Although the first iteration was not perfect, Jesse’s team was able to iterate quickly and immediately deploy adjustments that produced the desired result on day one.

The Results: Well Informed Customers Who Are Prepared for Delivery

Thanks to Enzo, Peerless is now fearless when it comes to automated client messaging. The system has not only helped streamline delivery processes, but the responsive and real-time interactions create strong brand experiences and increase trust with clients.