As the third largest Coca-Cola bottler in the United States, Coca-Cola Bottling Company UNITED needs a business intelligence solution that can handle an immense amount of data while still providing answers at the speed of thought. In March of 2014, Coca-Cola UNITED began a spree of acquisitions that would stretch their wholesale business from 50,000 customers and 58.6MM cases to 155,000 customers and 205.4MM cases by October 2017.

A massive jump in employees, production facilities, and sales centers meant an equally impressive jump in data. For UNITED though, the speed and scalability of Salient’s revenue management business intelligence solution never wavered.

“The performance and the stability and reliability has not lost a step, which I think is pretty unique for an analytics solution,” said Beeland Nielsen, Director of Commercial Leadership at Coca-Cola UNITED. “Over the last decade we have doubled our SKU portfolio, tripled the number of customers and the footprint that we do business in. Our discount methodologies and pricing mechanisms have continued to grow more and more complex. And when you compound all that, you’re talking about an exponentially larger data set with more nuances to it,” continued Nielsen.

The nuance lies not only in voluminous data, but also in diverse demographics and selling territories. Since the large expansion of UNITED’s footprint, they now distribute Coca-Cola products across landscapes that stretch from the coast to the mountains, urbanized metropolitan areas to the rural countryside.

“I’m not going to rely on some analyst group in Birmingham, Alabama that doesn’t know a whole lot about New Orleans, Louisiana to make decisions for that place. Because of a solution like this, I’ve enabled [local teams] to be in a position to make decisions that are best for that marketplace, for their consumers, and for their customers based on their competitive landscape. That’s a huge deal in a footprint like ours.”

To do this, Coca-Cola UNITED deploys Salient’s business intelligence solution to 1,776 users, spanning from the CEO to the field sales representatives. The flexibility and variety of Salient’s software suite allows different roles and business users to utilize the solution whether at their desks or inside a store while in the field.

In the office, executives may choose to dive deep into Salient’s desktop application, Salient Interactive Miner. Meant for exploring the finer details, Salient’s desktop solution allows business users to drill into any level of data to answer “why?” and perform root cause analysis.

In the store, Coca-Cola UNITED’s field sales representatives find “why” by taking advantage of Salient’s mobile application, logging into the app from smartphones or tablets preloaded with dashboards and analysis to help them perform their daily duties at the store. Now a $3.5B company that operates in such a diverse manner across such a wide footprint, the instant access to data and information allows their business users to make value-added decisions on the fly.

“Key account managers are using it constantly. Every stop they make, if the customer is available, they’re showing them the numbers – volume and margin,” said Bryan Robertson, Commercial Capabilities Manager at UNITED. For Robertson, the ability to get to actionable intelligence while in the store has set UNITED apart from their competitors. “Our competition is not doing that. Instead of just saying [to customers], ‘I want to sell Coca-Cola’, it’s ‘I want to grow your business, and this is how we can do it’. That’s something our competition is not doing. They are there to sell product any way they can, they don’t get down to the ground level with the customer,” he said.

Coca-Cola UNITED’s ability to create strong relationships has been echoed in their time with Salient, a relationship that started in July of 1999. Since 1999, UNITED and Salient have been at the forefront of business intelligence and analytical innovation. “It’s really a collaboration,” said Foree when speaking of the relationship between Salient and UNITED.

In that time, just a pair of the notable accolades UNITED has claimed include being named Beverage World’s Bottler of the Year (2003) and the President’s Award for Quality & Excellence from The Coca-Cola Company (2012). “One of the big advantages with Salient was that they came out of the beverage industry. They understood what we were talking about. Our industry is unique, and when interacting with Salient, they did understand because they started out in that business. It really made it a lot easier for us to go in and describe all the different ways we interact with our distribution models and delivery types,” said Foree.

For Nielsen, Salient’s stability, speed, and ability to scale have been the biggest differentiator. “We’ve really transformed our company over the last five years, and the solution has not skipped a beat and in fact has improved in many ways,” he said, adding, “I don’t know what life was like before Salient, because it’s been a part of our organization as long as I have, but I don’t how they [UNITED] manage their business without it.”