Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits

Delivering on Promises with a Culture of Resilience

Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits is the world’s preeminent distributor of wine and spirits, with operations in 44 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, and Canada. Thousands of people in the wine and spirits industry depend on Southern Glazer’s ability to deliver every day. The company maintains over 200 locations and distributes products to small and large stores, bars, restaurants, hotels, and other licensed outlets where alcoholic beverages are responsibly sold or served.  As an essential business, Southern Glazer’s needed to build a centralized view of its distributed operations in order to engage executive leadership in the development of a comprehensive continuity of operations plan. Above all, they needed to ensure that they could withstand any business disruption with a real-time operational resilience program.

Data at the Core

Southern Glazer’s Business Continuity team wanted to build an operational resilience program with sophisticated automation that put its valuable data at the center of all functions. The team needed real-time reporting capabilities to easily present to executive management, a mass notification system to alert all Southern Glazer’s sites to potential risks, and an operational construct that broke down potential silos across the organization to improve overall efficiency.

Southern Glazer’s began the search for a provider that would offer a strong partnership in building a holistic and robust resiliency system. Their Business Continuity team evaluated more than ten vendors and conducted a thorough analysis and reference check on each provider. The company ultimately selected Fusion Risk Management for its customization and integration capabilities, data-centric approach, and comprehensive dashboarding and reporting capabilities.

The Fusion and Southern Glazer’s Business Continuity team immediately set out to work on conducting a critical analysis of every process across the organization, identifying gaps and areas with potential for improved efficiency and automation, with an aim to understand every Southern Glazer’s site, plan, and process. They worked closely to align their goals for the relationship, design the system from top to bottom, and establish best practices. Within weeks of program launch, Fusion’s importing capability methodically captured Southern Glazer’s disparate data and created a continuity plan template that empowered employees to generate presentation-quality reports in short order to engage management and ensure information is never outdated.

Most importantly, the Fusion team shared advanced programming and ample training to ensure the Southern Glazer’s implementation team of Marty Fox and Rebecca Christy understood Fusion’s full functionality. The Southern Glazer’s team was then empowered to do much of the follow-up development projects.  Southern Glazer’s credits Fusion’s knowledge transfer as critical to their success.

Engaging Executive Management with Real Time Reporting

Southern Glazer’s program today empowers true operational resilience with extremely detailed and efficient dashboards, workflows, rules engines, and automation. Southern Glazer’s now easily manages its vast site data, employees, supply chain, and dependencies in one central repository, and can cross-section data to visualize geographies and systems as necessary.

With the Fusion Framework, Southern Glazer’s continuity team can accurately and quickly report to executive leadership and encourage cross-organization transparency. The Fusion Report Writer delivers the ability to create reports in one hour, a process which previously took a week or more to produce, to clearly communicate critical status with stakeholders in near real-time.

With Fusion’s advanced automation and guided workflows, the Southern Glazer’s continuity team can generate data and results at the push of a button – a process that would otherwise require a full-time employee. Fusion’s customized feeds have resulted in increased collaboration and cross-department engagement across the organization, as well as harnessed the strength of Fusion’s Salesforce foundation to integrate external providers. Executive management and tangential departments note the value of Fusion’s holistic approach to operational resilience and integrations to detect, alert, and mitigate risk factors before they impact operations. Fusion’s integrations offer a comprehensive map of business functions to a centralized resilience view, which has garnered positive stakeholder feedback and buy-in from multiple departments.

Fusion’s partnership is a powerful driver of Southern Glazer’s Business Continuity program success – and they have credited the Fusion team for being amazing, imaginative, and innovative. In addition to the real time assessments, data normalization, and a structured approach to mapping relationship between people, locations and technology for which Southern Glazer’s champions Fusion, they also benefit from Fusion’s community programs, including the Engage Program and Knowledge Center.

Weathering Disruption with Agile Partnership

The Fusion Framework system has enabled Southern Glazer’s to be prepared for and continue operating their business successfully through any disruption. The flexible nature of the Framework system allows Southern Glazer’s to grow its program as needs change and evolve functionality with new priorities.

Operational Resilience – Promises Kept

By partnering with Fusion, Southern Glazer’s has built a holistic program that centralizes and normalizes data from its facilities, employees, and supplier network to continue delivering on its employee safety and customer promises.