Thirsty for Innovation? 3 Ways OnActuate is Refreshing Dynamics 365 for Beverage Bottlers 

From local Coca-Cola bottlers to nationally recognized mineral water brands, our global bottling customers were searching for a way to connect their disparate ERP systems. In response, OnActuate designed an extended solution for bottlers that unifies systems for enhanced efficiency and scalability. 

This proven and reliable extended solution automates common processes and ensures bottling businesses are prepared for growth. It leverages the features of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain (D365 F&SC) and is built using the secure, scalable, and cloud-hosted Power Platform, providing functional applications tailored to the unique requirements of bottlers. The best part is that it’s all under one unified system – no more dealing with different separate apps with difficulty sharing data with one another. 

Here are three key features of this extended solution that address top pain points and typical business processes for the bottling industry. 

A common challenge that bottlers must deal with is understanding and managing inventory. OnActuate’s Dealer Management feature grants dealers access to inventory management systems that facilitate inventory planning, automatically analyze historical inventory data, and categorize channel pricing to differentiate inventory service levels. 

Additionally, the Empties Management feature provides a clear picture of status of empty bottles, their movements, and the balance for each vendor account based on value and quantity. 

Bottlers can gain total control of product movement using the extended solution’s Transportation Management (Route Plan) and Fleet Management feature. Transportation Management helps identify vendor and routing solutions for inbound and outbound orders, while Fleet Management allows the bottler to plan orders efficiently to trucks with drivers, or shipping agents, based on constraints in weight, pallet places, etc. 

The system also supports subcontracting of route operations in production orders or batch orders as well as subcontracting of production flow activities in a lean production flow using Sales Data and Jar Tracking.

Beverage bottlers rely on data to make important business decisions. If a company can’t make use of the data associated with the sales performance of a certain product from previous years to make decisions on go-to-market strategy, it is losing ground on how to frame the right strategy in the coming years for that product in the market. Our bottling customers needed to analyze and utilize new data from D365 F&Sc as well past data from previous platforms.  

In response, OnActuate developed a one-of-a-kind technology agnostic analytical platform, OnActuate Data Confluence & Insights for the beverage sector. This solution migrates both current data and past data from different sources into one secured cloud-hosted data source to draw meaningful business insights – current and predictive. Now our customers benefit from relevant and predictive analytics for decision-making support. Some examples include visualizing which product sales are up, and which are down to make sales predictions. As well as reporting on sales demographics in real-time, such as sales by region, to analyze geographical impact.

D365 F&Sc provides a comprehensive suite of application software and enabling technology that serves to replace costly disparate systems. With OnActuate’s targeted enhancements, the extended solution meets the sector’s specific needs including interoperability with the bottlers’ route accounting, mobile, and more. This further automates collaborative processing with your partner channels while enhancing productivity, client retention, and growth.    

Ready to eliminate business bottlenecks? Contact us to learn more about this extended solution for bottlers.