Promotion volatility outpacing baseline
Trade activity is up, cycles are shorter, and the baseline forecast has never mattered less. Promo-aware ML is now table stakes.
INDUSTRY · PRIMARY FOCUS
Drink & Beverages.
Promotion-heavy demand, seasonal peaks, and route-to-market complexity. We plan around the realities of trade, not against them.
Carbonated soft drinks
Water & juice
Beer & spirits
Non-alcoholic
01 · KEY TRENDS
What we are seeing on the floor.
Signal from live engagements with mid to large drinks manufacturers across Europe.
Sustainability rewriting the network
Glass, cans, and PET decisions are cascading into DC footprints and inbound flows. Planning models built for cost are quietly obsolete.
Route-to-market fragmentation
Direct-to-consumer, wholesale, and modern trade all pulling at the same finite stock. Segmentation is the answer, not more inventory.
02 · KEY CHALLENGES
Where the plan breaks first.
CH / 01
Promotion signal buried in noise
Uplifts modelled at brand level, executed at SKU-market level. The join loses fidelity every time.
CH / 02
Seasonal capacity constraints
Peak plans that assume nominal throughput. Reality: bottling lines do not hit nominal.
CH / 03
Master data drift
New SKUs launched faster than the master-data flow can keep up with. Optimizer runs stale within a fortnight.
CH / 04
Silence between commercial & supply
The commercial team's ambition does not show up in the supply plan until Wave 3 of S&OP. Too late.
03 · WHAT WE DO HERE
Straveo in drinks & beverages.
Where our three practices apply to this vertical specifically.
SVC / 01
Consulting
Operating-model and cadence design for beverage supply chains: how demand, supply, promo, and commercial actually meet in your week. Promo-aware demand planning, seasonal capacity governance, trade-loading and sell-through planning.
SVC / 02 · CORE PRACTICE
Optimisation
SAP Integrated Business Planning tuned for the beverage reality: promo-uplift ML models, bottling and canning capacity constraints inside the optimizer, and Vendor-Managed Inventory for trade partners.
SVC / 03
Process Improvement
Where the plan quietly reverts to Excel, we make it stop. Planning maturity diagnostic, master-data governance runbook, and handoffs between commercial and supply teams.
04 · CASE STUDIES
What we have shipped in this vertical.
Case studies live inside the industry, not siloed. Every programme, one senior planner in the room.
18-month stalled SAP IBP rollout, recovered in 90 days
Global beverage manufacturer, EU25. Rollout had been live for eighteen months and trusted by nobody. Planners were quietly working back in spreadsheets. Straveo rebased the optimizer, redesigned the S&OP cadence with the planning team, and stayed in the room until the numbers held.
Sector · Drink & Beverages
Scope · Demand + supply
Markets · 14
Duration · 90 days
Promo-aware demand planning, machine-learning forecast
Non-alcoholic beverage portfolio, UK & Ireland. Baseline forecasts were being drowned by promo activity. We introduced a promo-aware ML layer inside SAP IBP, retrained the demand planners on the new signal, and rewired the weekly cadence around explainable uplifts.
Sector · Drink & Beverages
Scope · Demand planning
Model · Gradient boosting
SKU mix · 340
Segmentation and policy design for a spirits portfolio
Premium spirits producer, EU5 + North America. Portfolio of long-tail SKUs, single-tier network. We segmented by demand pattern and value contribution, then designed differentiated inventory policies. Cash release funded the next optimisation wave.
Sector · Drink & Beverages
Scope · Inventory optimisation
SKUs · 1,200
Outcome · WC release