Ciamesa
www.ciamesa.comCiamesa rebuilds nationwide distribution for the next 90 years
A modern warehouse, route, and B2B ordering stack covering 100% of Costa Rica — without missing a delivery during cutover.
Vision
Build the operating stack a 1932 distributor will run on for the next 90 years — and make every driver and customer service rep feel like the system was built around them.
Impact
A modern warehouse, route, and B2B ordering platform that covers 100% of Costa Rica, raises on-time delivery to 98.7%, and cuts order entry time by 64% — with zero deliveries missed during cutover.
Key services
- Custom Software
- Cloud & Platform Engineering
- Experience Design
- Systems Integration
Customer results
- 98.7%
- On-time deliveries (up from 91%)
- −64%
- Order entry time
- 0
- Deliveries missed during cutover
The challenge
Ninety years of process, and not enough of it on paper
Ciamesa knew the country like very few of its competitors. After 90 years of nationwide distribution, the team had internalized a thousand small operational rules — which restaurants only receive in the morning, which holiday weeks need a re-routed cold-chain plan, which retail accounts call back to confirm an order. Most of that knowledge lived in the heads of long-tenured supervisors and the muscle memory of the drivers. It worked. It also wasn't transferable.
The pressure to change came from two directions. New competitors with smaller portfolios but smarter software were starting to peel off the most profitable accounts. And the operations leadership was approaching retirement — taking with them the operational rules of thumb that no document captured. The board's question was not whether to modernize, but how to do it without losing the very thing that made Ciamesa different.
Our approach
The system has to know what the supervisors know
We started by encoding the implicit, not by replacing it. For two months, our team rode trucks, sat with customer service reps, and shadowed the warehouse pickers. Every "we always do it this way" got logged. Every exception that turned out not to be an exception got captured. By the end of the discovery phase, we had nearly 400 operational rules — most of which had never been written down, several of which contradicted each other, and a handful of which everyone had agreed should stop years ago but no system had enforced.
That inventory became the spine of the build. We agreed early that the new platform would automate the rules people had agreed to, document the rules people still wanted to keep, and surface the contradictions for leadership to resolve — not paper over them. The discipline of that distinction is what made the rollout boring, which is the highest compliment for an operational platform.
“The day after cutover, no driver called the office for an exception. That had never happened.”
What we built
Three surfaces, one stack
We rolled out the platform in three coordinated surfaces — the warehouse, the route, and the customer — sequenced so each one was proven before the next went live.
A warehouse surface that fits the floor
We rebuilt the warehouse management system around the physical floor, not around the inventory hierarchy. Pickers see a single pick path per wave; supervisors see a heat-map of the bins that are running tight. The system handles lot, expiry, and temperature constraints natively for the wine and spirits inventory, and surfaces the rare exceptions to the human in charge rather than escalating every edge case.
A route surface drivers actually want to use
The driver app was designed in three rounds with actual drivers, not stakeholders. It shows the next stop, the customer's standing notes — gate codes, dock preferences, the contact who signs — and a one-tap path to capture exceptions. Routes are optimized centrally each morning but every driver can adjust their own based on what they know about their day. That last detail is what made adoption near-instant.
A customer surface for the next 90 years
For the restaurants, bars, hotels, and retailers Ciamesa serves, we built a B2B ordering portal with a parallel mobile experience. Customers see real inventory and real delivery windows, not promises. The order entry rep can place an order alongside a customer call in seconds. And the call patterns that used to require eight different decision criteria for cutoff times now happen automatically — the customer either makes the window or sees the next available one.
Customer impact
Quieter days, fuller trucks
On-time delivery moved from 91% to 98.7% in the first six months. Order entry time dropped 64% — the rep on the phone now spends most of the call helping the customer, not navigating the system. Inventory holding cost dropped by mid-single digits as the planning surface caught up to actual demand. And the most telling metric: the number of supervisor escalations during a normal day fell by half.
Cutover landed on a Tuesday morning. Not a single delivery was missed.
What’s next
What's next
With the operational platform in place, Ciamesa is moving into the next phase: route-level profitability analytics, dynamic pricing for the on-trade accounts, and a self-service onboarding experience for new customers. The 90-year head start in customer relationships still matters; the platform just gives the team the time to use it.