Case 05 · FMCG
Seeing what sold, not just what shipped
A packaged-juice manufacturer knew exactly what left its factories and very little about what left its distributors' warehouses. We built the sales and finance view that puts dispatch and sell-through side by side — by area, flavour and pack — with the profit and loss of each company in the group beside it.
The situation
Dispatch looked healthy. Nobody knew if it was selling.
Sales were measured at the factory gate. What happened next — whether stock moved from distributors to retailers — sat in a different system, in a different shape, and rarely reached the people setting targets.
- Primary dispatch and secondary sell-through were reported separately and never reconciled.
- The business ran through four legal companies, each with its own accounts.
What we built
Both halves of the sale, and the money behind them.
- Primary and secondary sales by area, flavour and pack size, with year-on-year comparisons and the few parties that make up most of the volume.
- A reconciliation view that makes the gap between what shipped and what sold explicit, by area.
- Profit and loss and balance sheet for each of the four companies and for the group, with costs, receivables, payables, loans and trends.
- Plain-language questions over the data, with suggested questions to start from.
What was hard
Two systems that were never meant to agree.
Primary and secondary don't match by design. They come from different systems with different timing and product codes. Rather than force them to agree, the reconciliation view shows where and by how much they differ.
Speed on a small budget. Sales teams abandon slow screens, so the data is held in a fast in-memory layer and pages answer immediately.
What changed
Sales conversations moved from shipped to sold.
- Area and flavour decisions are based on what consumers bought, not only on what was pushed into the channel.
- Finance and sales look at the same company-level profit and loss.
Client name withheld. A reference call can be arranged under NDA.