NILWA
The data behind a national liquor buying group
- 4 million records migrated to the cloud
- Signature Drinks sales portal
- Automated Power BI reporting
- More than 100 hours a month of manual entry removed
NILWA - the National Independent Liquor Wholesalers Association - was a national buying group for independent liquor wholesalers. For 27 years it negotiated supplier agreements for its members, ran national marketing programs and the Signature Drinks brand, and reached more than 10,000 bars, hotels and restaurants through its wholesalers. Red Crow Digital built and ran the systems at the heart of the business until the association closed in 2024.
Challenge
Data keyed in by hand
NILWA's work ran on sales and supplier data from its wholesale members, but that data lived in a dated on-site database with little automation and poorly structured records. Staff spent hours every month keying figures in by hand, reporting was slow, and it was hard to see what was selling across members, suppliers and venues.
Solution
A cloud database, automated
- A review of NILWA's systems and processes up front, which shaped the scope and surfaced the inefficiencies to fix first
- A cloud database on AWS, with more than 4 million records migrated from the old system and restructured along the way
- Automated data integration from members, replacing manual data entry
- Power BI reporting on sales, key venue groups and supplier terms, refreshed automatically
- The Signature Drinks sales portal for reps on the road: the product range by category, supplier discounts, a serve calculator for pricing drinks by the glass, customer registrations and promotions
Results
100 hours a month back
- More than 100 hours a month of manual data entry removed
- Sales and supplier reporting that updated itself, instead of being built by hand
- A system NILWA ran on until the association closed in May 2024
"Red Crow are a smart team of developers who through collaboration find solutions that can be tailored to suit business needs. Love their work!"
- Jenny Hughes, General Manager, NILWA