Disrupting Wine Delivery: How Sidekick Scaled a Startup Into an Acquisition Magnet.

Summary

Sidekick was a small startup aiming to disrupt the last-mile delivery business in the direct wine-to-table sales channel. Using technology to automate essential business processes, Sidekick was able to create an innovative delivery model to lower the final cost to wine sellers.

MVP development and testing

Ruby-on-Rails +

Javascript app development

Wireframing, UI+UX design

Roadmap + project management

Feature sequencing

Requirements

Solution

An Order Management System (OMS) was built from scratch using technologies that are core to RHI expertise. The OMS incorporated a double-entry accounting system for accurate tracking of inventory items throughout the entire ordering process, providing secure and instant updates to all relevant parties.

Additionally, the team developed a unique solution to combine disparate Purchase Orders into a single Master Order. This decreased end-customer shipping prices and simplified ordering. The solution that was developed provided visibility to all parties involved in the transaction while respecting the privacy of their data.

To meet national and state-level legal requirements for alcoholic beverage sales, RHI developed business rules and software processes to support chain-of-custody tracking throughout the entire transaction.

With regard to billing and revenue capture, features were added to enable wine owners to upload their own custom invoices for billing consigned wine deliveries. Sidekick used the reporting capabilities to bill wine owners for their services in order to capture revenue for the Sidekick business.

Conclusion

Sidekick was an early-stage logistics company specializing in last-mile alcohol delivery. A great deal of focus was put into making the software platform extensible and scalable. The work of RHI enabled Sidekick to flourish in its first few years, setting the stage for its first acquisition by Hillebrand-Gori.