Now it all adds up for Cheney Brothers
Leading broadline wholesale foodservice distributor upgrades enterprise systems and transforms pricing strategy with Vistex enterprise software
"With 64,000 items moving through our fast-changing foodservice business, most of our sales reps are more confident about pricing than the data says they should be. If it's a 20-item pricing test, they might know the correct price for one of them. Vistex gives them the correct price for 18 or 19 of them, and that's removed a lot of the guesswork from how our team prices."
Jeremy Booth
Director of Pricing, Cheney Brothers, Inc.
Overview
Cheney Brothers, Inc., one of America’s fastest-growing broadline wholesale foodservice distributors, faced dual modernization challenges. Legacy system constraints, including performance limitations, escalating maintenance costs, integration complexity, and limited analytics, made migration to SAP S/4HANA essential ahead of the 2027 end-of-support deadline.
The company also needed a smarter, more sustainable pricing approach. With up to 20,000 SKUs per facility and 2,000-3,000 new products updating weekly across a diverse portfolio, pricing decisions had become increasingly complex, inconsistent and overly dependent on individual sales rep execution. Cheney Brothers required both a modernized enterprise infrastructure and a data-driven pricing strategy to scale growth while improving pricing consistency, margin control and financial visibility.
Solution
Cheney Brothers partnered with Vistex on a bold, single-wave upgrade, migrating six distribution centers and five production facilities to SAP S/4HANA while converting the full Vistex solution suite to S/4HANA. Completed in under 12 months, it delivered a new pricing calculation engine, improved performance and native SAP integration without third-party interfaces. Price guidance adoption is being phased deliberately, proving the concept where it adds the most value before scaling company-wide.
Building on this foundation, SAP margin optimization solutions by Vistex create pricing data models analyzing revenue, profit, and margin across dimensions (customer type, region, product class, group and quadrant, customer size and individual products) so pricing reflects the market rather than day-today cost swings, which is a key advantage as SKU costs shift weekly. The engine processes millions of transactions to deliver consistent, data-backed recommendations directly into field reps’ existing platforms via four integrated dashboards.
Results
Cheney Brothers emerged with a modernized enterprise platform and a new approach to pricing strategy, eliminating legacy performance bottlenecks and building a scalable foundation for data-driven decision-making across the organization.
SAP margin optimization solutions by Vistex transformed how pricing decisions are made. By continuously processing millions of transactions, margin-optimized recommendations are engineered to be delivered directly into the tools field reps use, with an early pilot at one facility showing 70% sales team agreement with system-recommended pricing. This reduces dependence on individual rep execution, accelerates new-hire productivity and gives the company control over pricing strategy that was previously hard to execute, replacing guesswork with data the business can stand behind.
SAP margin optimization solutions by Vistex provide real-time visibility into margin variation by class, validating pricing decisions and enabling teams to identify the greatest deviations, assess opportunities and adjust strategies proactively.
As cost volatility continues, Cheney Brothers expects price guidance to deliver consistent results without disrupting sales operations or requiring reps to justify every change. With additional Vistex solutions on the horizon, pricing remains a governed, transparent growth engine, setting the stage for continued innovation
About
Cheney Brothers, Inc.
Cheney Brothers is one of America’s fastest-growing broadline wholesale foodservice distributors, serving customers throughout Florida, the Southeastern U.S. and clients worldwide via land, air and sea. Founded in 1925 and now in its fourth generation of family ownership, the company operates six distribution centers and five production facilities. The company maintains an active inventory of more than 64,000 stock items and generates annual revenue exceeding $3 billion
Headquarters: Riviera Beach, FL
Industry: Wholesale Distribution
Products: Broadline food and non-food distribution, including beverages, dairy, produce, meat, seafood, disposables and equipment
Revenue: $3B+
Locations: 6 distribution centers and 5 production facilities
Solutions implemented:
SAP margin optimization solutions by Vistex
- SAP Paybacks and Chargebacks by Vistex
- SAP Incentive Administration by Vistex
- SAP Data Maintenance by Vistex, pricing option
- SAP Extended Price Management by Vistex