Alliance Foods was struggling with the time it took to service stores and get accurate communication back from the field. Additionally, with no automated follow-up in place, it was difficult to close the loop on retail service. Without the correct system in place, store service was slow, labor-intensive, and prone to error. Follow-up was difficult, as commitments were difficult to track; and driving accountability across all stakeholders responsible for resolving store and shelf-level issues was not predictable.

ESP began by interviewing Alliance Foods' Executive management, merchandising operations staff, and Alliance IT. During the process, ESP learned about unique and proprietary methods Alliance uses to set themselves apart from other sales organizations -- and many of the unique and extremely challenging business processes those methods created. To create the best possible result, ESP would need to capture the human-labor-intensive business process and automate it which would save in-store associates a significant amount of time in stores -- allowing the associates to visit more stores and employ the proprietary process to drive sales lift across Alliance's customer base.