In early 2008, Beam Global Spirits & Wine recognized it had significant opportunities to improve the way it managed pricing and distributor margins at the market level. Unfortunately, the Excel-based pricing system in place at the time severely limited the company’s ability to operationalize changes that were necessary to improve its overall pricing performance. As a result, a cross functional team was assembled to commence a large-scale price improvement initiative, which included specs for a new enterprise-wide price planning and management tool.