Empire Merchants North decided to partner with Clarkston Consulting to reinvent its enterprise systems landscape, leveraging Clarkston’s expertise in wine and spirits distribution combined with Clarkston’s IT strategy and SAP expertise. Learn how we worked together to help Empire Merchants North accomplish their business goals.

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Empire Merchants North is one of the largest wholesalers of fine wine and spirits in upstate New York. Empire Merchants North was forged in February 2007 from the merger of Colony Liquors and Service Liquors, two companies whose roots reach back to the end of Prohibition. With state-of-the-art facilities and a large, dedicated field sales team, Empire distributes product to more than 9,000 restaurants, hotels, and retail outlets.

Empire Merchants North reached out to Clarkston to lead a spin-off of its enterprise systems from an affiliated company who had provided shared IT and business services. Over a compressed 10-month period, the joint project team reinvented the mature shared services platform. The successful transition was comprised of SAP and approximately 20 other enterprise systems.

The transition achieved continuity of operations for Empire Merchants North, its influential supplier partners, and retail customers.

Primary Objectives:

• Continuity of operations and the ability to seamlessly transition distribution on behalf of Empire Merchants North’s suppliers
• Minimize business interruption or downtime by creating a comparable and sustainable system and business services platform in an extremely accelerated timeline

Resolution:

• Assessed shared systems portfolio and determined the best landscape for Empire Merchants North moving forward
• Clarkston led the greenfield implementations of SAP, Vistex, OpenText invoice management, Concur Time and Expense management, Liquid sales automation, Diver business intelligence, Sterling EDI, full warehouse integration, and several other enterprise applications

Key Benefits:

• Operational continuity for Empire and their supplier partners, including but not limited to Diageo, Gallo, and Brown-Forman, as well as retail customers with zero delivery dates missed
• Operating independence which strategically positions Empire Merchants North to trade on its dominance of the pivotal New York markets
• A world-class enterprise systems platform that presents the opportunity for synergies with Empire Merchants Metro, operating in New York City and Long Island
• Transition from shared business services to in-house operations allowing Empire Merchants North to control and optimize its own processes for master data management, accounts payable, accounts receivable, customer care, human resources, and payroll