Liberty Coca-Cola Beverages is one of the largest Coca-Cola bottlers in North America, serving Pennsylvania and New Jersey with a legacy that stretches back more than a century. From horse-drawn wagons to a modern, high-volume direct-store-delivery operation, the company’s history is rooted in growth, resilience and deep ties to its communities.

By the late 1990s, however, Liberty faced a familiar bottler challenge: margins were tightening, complexity was increasing and information was scattered across disconnected systems. The business wasn’t short on data, it was short on understanding.

Liberty collected large volumes of sales, pricing, promotion and service data, but that information lived in silos. Reporting was slow, fragmented and largely inaccessible to the people closest to the work.

Sales teams had little visibility into profitability by customer, brand or route. Management relied on high-level summaries that arrived days later and required IT and finance teams to reconcile numbers manually.

The result was a reactive organization, forced to manage from 30,000 feet while margin erosion continued at street level.

Rather than attempting to save their way into profitability through cost cuts alone, Liberty’s leadership made a different choice.

Liberty partnered with Salient to create a single, shared foundation for understanding margin, profitability and operational drivers without ripping out systems that already worked.

The goal was simple but ambitious: give everyone who influences profit access to the same truth, at the level where decisions actually get made.

Once information was centralized and made accessible, Liberty made a critical cultural shift. Visibility was no longer reserved for analysts or executives. Sales teams, managers and leadership all worked from the same view of performance.

Sales teams could now see margin by customer, brand and route. Managers could spot exceptions immediately. Conversations shifted from defending numbers to fixing problems.

As Liberty deepened its understanding of profitability, the organization began connecting revenue to the true cost of doing business.

Delivery costs, service calls, assets, labor and repair expenses were all considered alongside sales performance.

This allowed Liberty to:

• Optimize routes based on cost-to-serve
• Identify unprofitable accounts previously assumed to be healthy
• Track asset performance and chronic service issues
• Understand the full profitability picture of each customer

The impact was immediate and material. With a clear understanding of performance, Liberty:

• Refined sales compensation models tied to true operating profit
• Identified and addressed unprofitable accounts and assets
• Reduced manual reporting cycles from weeks to hours
• Enabled faster, better decisions across the organization

In one analysis alone, Liberty uncovered hundreds of accounts and assets that were quietly eroding profit issues that would have compounded without visibility.

For Liberty Coca-Cola Beverages, performance improvement didn’t come from adding complexity. It came from removing friction between data, decisions and accountability.

When information is shared, timely and trusted, margin management stops being reactive and becomes a discipline.