Southern Glazer’s Aims To Take Digital Transformation To The Next Level

Over the last year, Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits chief digital officer Alan Wizemann has worked to overhaul the distributor’s digital footprint and harness the company’s wealth of sales data to streamline the customer experience and spur growth for the largest spirits and wine wholesaler in the U.S. This year, the company’s sales are projected to reach $26 billion, accounting for a 36% market share, according to Shanken’s Impact Newsletter.

Southern Glazer’s is targeting sales of $4 billion for its Proof e-commerce platform this year, accounting for more than 15% of its total revenue. Southern Glazer’s CEO Wayne Chaplin told SND earlier his year that Wizemann has given the company a leg up in its digitization drive. “Alan brings lots of great experience from prior engagements with Lululemon and Target, and he’s bringing some incredible out of the box thinking to our industry and to our company that I think is really going to take our lead in the digital space to the next level,” he said.

The digital transformation, Wizemann tells SND, covers Southern Glazer’s internal and external portals, including Proof, and will leverage machine learning, AI, and SGWS’s data infrastructure to provide better recommendations to customers. The same tools, he says, will also give the company and suppliers better opportunities to influence purchase and build brands.

“Every website you buy something from, you’re going to get recommendations,” he says. “Our AI teams have been building recommendations that are based specifically on the customer and all the information that we understand about them through our relationship. If we understand their menus, then we can also help make recommendations based on different cocktails they can serve with certain ingredients or make recommendations for ingredients to expand their cocktail assortment.”

For national accounts, Wizemann says the new approach and recommendations can encourage customers to grow their assortment in organic ways and without disrupting their current workflows. “Because of the breadth and depth of our catalog, we can offer up great recommendations for what they probably should do,” he says. “We’re going to try to figure out how to show them what it could do for their bottom line.”

Wizemann has brought in a team of outside engineers while consolidating Southern Glazer’s data insights and analytics teams under the wider umbrella of digital. In this regard, Wizemann says the company had a solid foundation for him to build on. “They had Proof and the Proof sales platforms and the data insights and analytics teams,” he says. “It wasn’t starting from scratch, but we did build some teams and effectively combined a lot of the teams internally to make sure that we didn’t have to worry about any organizational issues or blockers.”

On the back end, Wizemann says he and his team have improved search functions within Proof, as well as general upgrades to the distributor’s large-scale ordering platforms. “We formed teams just to focus on these areas to make sure we are as easy as possible to order from and that we have fewer issues around order accuracy and inventory accuracy,” he says. “A lot of work we’re doing is to make things a lot faster, a lot more controllable, a lot more testable, and a lot more manageable, but always through the lens of value for our customers.”—Shane English

Tagged : Southern Glazer's

GET YOUR FIRST LOOK AT 2025 ESTIMATES AND 2030 PROJECTIONS FOR THE WINE AND SPIRITS INDUSTRIES. ORDER YOUR 2025 IMPACT DATABANK REPORTS. CLICK HERE.