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In Peru’s traditional retail channel, a distributor lives on very thin margins.
Alvarez Bohl knows it. The family company has distributed mass-consumption goods across northern Peru for 60 years.
Its 950 employees serve more than 70,000 recurring clients from seven sites, from Tumbes to Huamachuco.
That means around 10,000 orders to prepare, load and deliver every day.
At that scale, every minute lost in the warehouse and every badly loaded truck comes straight out of the margin.
The company already runs SAP and has built its own core business systems. Yet developing the next layer in-house, or with traditional consultants, “would take us a lot of time, maybe years“, says José Campos, Managing Director of Alvarez Bohl.
In a new episode of the EU-LAC Digital Accelerator podcast, José and Rafael Tirado, IT Director, talked to two mentors of the acceleration programme:
- Miguel Rodríguez, from Octantis,
- Lorena Becerra, from Wayra.
So, what does a 60-year-old family business learn from working with startups?
1. Startups bring three things: disruptive technology, speed and customisation
Alvarez Bohl had already done a lot on its own: an ERP rollout, a move to the cloud, its own core systems.
But at some point, Rafael says, “we realised that on our own we could not move as fast as we needed“.
José sums up what startups bring instead:
- Disruptive technology: specialised solutions already proven in other markets.
- Speed: a startup integrates in a fraction of the time an in-house or consultant-led project would take.
- Customisation: the flexibility to adapt that technology to Alvarez Bohl’s local reality.
They also shake up the culture: “They force our traditional teams to think in an agile way, to make mistakes quickly and cheaply, so we learn faster.“
Here is how a collaboration looked with Portuguese startup Tet4D:
| The problem: every day, around 10,000 orders must be split between trucks and routed across northern Peru. Done badly, that means more trucks on the road, longer routes and more fuel.
The pilot: Tet4D tested its transport management software in Chimbote, a smaller site where the team could control the conditions. What the software does:
|
2. A pilot only lands if the corporate is ready for it
The startup brings the technology. The corporate has to bring the conditions for it to work.
Here is what Alvarez Bohl put in place:
- Approval from the board. José calls it “the hardest part, and it will be the hardest part for any traditional company“. Every later step depended on it.
- Prioritised challenges. José led workshops with every operational manager to find the hidden costs: last-mile delivery, loading times, process gaps. Warehouse digitisation and smart routing came out on top.
- A method before the startup arrives. All staff went through innovation training, including how to quantify the results of an idea. “When you welcome someone into the company, you already need to plan the finish line“, José says.
- The business owns the project, not IT. “These transformation projects do not belong to technology. Let’s make them the business’s projects“, Rafael tells his teams. Every IT lead works with a business counterpart, such as the head of the warehouse, who owns the project because the gains land in their area.
- Real infrastructure, in a controlled test environment. One site and one product line for the warehouse pilot, one smaller site for the routing pilot, each connected to live systems. As Rafael puts it, the startups are ahead on artificial intelligence, but “what we have is a real business with real challenges“.
- Clear resources, and the same pace. A named IT team, a named business team, a clear work plan, and an incentive plan, because staff run the pilots on top of daily operations. “If we go slower as a corporate, the project takes the pace of the slowest“, Rafael warns.
3. The accelerator turns a challenge into a running pilot, and a pilot into a plan to scale
Rafael’s verdict on the experience is “very, very positive“.
What surprised him most was the speed of the scouting. Once the acceleration team had validated Alvarez Bohl’s two challenges, they went live on a matching platform. European startups then wrote in directly to express their interest.
From there, the process had a clear shape:
- A shortlist of three startups.
- Demos and detailed briefings.
- The choice of one startup.
- A pilot run with a set method, regular meetings and follow-up.
His conclusion is one any corporate can apply: “With our own resources and teams, we can move at a certain pace. But we can move much faster, and much bigger, if we collaborate with the ecosystem.“
José closes with the lesson his whole team took away: “The world is no longer distant. You just have to search in the right way.“
▶️ Watch the full podcast with José Campos and Rafael Tirado:
