How Icelandic Glacial put Claude to work across finance and production in 90 days
A bottled-water company with offices in Los Angeles and Iceland had started experimenting with Claude, one person at a time. In 90 days with Shannon Advisory, it moved to one company-wide workspace, connected NetSuite, Vividly and Kuebix, and ran month-end close in Claude.
- 47 people using Claude every week, two-thirds of assigned seats, with a peak of 49 in the week of September 21; 68 of 70 assigned seats used in the 90 days, 260,311 requests in total
- The July month-end close run in Claude, with journal entries posted through the NetSuite connector
- Two custom connectors live by July 31 (Vividly on July 13, Kuebix on July 31), and a NetSuite accuracy skill on every seat from August 13
- About 2,200 Cowork sessions and 2,900 MCP writes; about 158 hours saved on Anthropic's admin-analytics estimate at its default assumptions
The starting point
Icelandic Glacial bottles water in Iceland and sells it in the United States and internationally, from offices in Los Angeles and Iceland. The business runs on NetSuite, Microsoft 365, Vividly for trade spend, and Kuebix, a transportation management system.
In June 2026 the company set a 90-day mandate: a simpler business and a more profitable one. People had already started experimenting with Claude on their own: a five-seat plan for production on the Iceland domain, individual accounts in finance, and no shared workspace, connectors or skills. Month-end reporting still ran through Excel, with NetSuite data downloaded and relinked by hand.
Shannon Advisory started on June 8, 2026, with a 90-day scope covering finance and production.
One workspace
Shannon's first job was the foundation. It stood up a single Team workspace with both domains verified, retired the separate Iceland plan, and configured the Microsoft 365 and NetSuite connectors with the company's IT provider. NetSuite was connected on June 18. Six days later a NetSuite permissions rule stopped several finance users from connecting. Shannon traced it, the finance team created a dedicated connector role the same afternoon, and Shannon wrote the setup guide the rest of the company used.
Training on real work
Shannon ran a weekly finance session and a weekly production session, with the Iceland team gathered in one room on Teams. The first structured training, on July 2, was a slide deck. The feedback was that people were at different points, so Shannon dropped the slides and worked on the team's own files. By early August the finance session was no longer a lecture: someone would pull up a live workflow and the group worked through it. Office hours booked through Calendly opened to finance on June 30, and by mid-August group sessions had given way to one-on-one time.
Skills built with users
Jennifer Delaney, VP of Finance & Controller, built her first skill in a July office-hours session and kept going: by mid-July she had a set of month-end skills for accruals and journal entries, and the July close ran through them. Shannon's part was to start the pattern and clear what got in the way. When Claude's NetSuite queries would not tie to the income statement, Shannon wrote a skill with her that tells Claude how to pull financials from NetSuite so the numbers reconcile; it went to every seat on August 13. The current version has Claude take the income statement from NetSuite's own report (Reports > Financial > Income Statement), run by posting period, instead of querying transactions by date.
Skills and scheduled tasks then spread across the team: an accounts-payable specialist's weekly payment report, a staff accountant's purchase-order and invoice breakouts, the US finance director's monthly case-economics report saved as a plugin, and a morning email triage that drafts replies. In Iceland, the supply chain manager built the workspace's first custom skill live on a call, without writing code. By September skills were moving between users as well: Delaney had shared a customer-billback skill with a colleague, and Keira Mayock, Financial Director in Iceland, had shared one of her own. Mayock's skills take vendor documents and post the journal entries to NetSuite directly.
Two custom connectors
Vividly and Kuebix have no off-the-shelf Claude connectors, so Shannon built a remote MCP server for each on Google Cloud, read-only by design. Vividly went live on July 13. Kuebix came from outside the original scope: in week two the logistics lead asked for a connection to the TMS, and Shannon built it. It went live on July 31, covering freight quotes, shipment lookups, bills of lading and tracking. Within a week the finance team was using it too, in a single project that drew on NetSuite, SharePoint, Vividly and Kuebix at once.
What changed
The numbers are in the box above. The change behind them looks like this. On July 6, Delaney said of a test journal entry that it "takes longer than if I just did it myself." On August 19, after the July close: "I basically just did the whole close in Claude." A collections specialist on her team now summarizes deduction notices in "literally less than five minutes." In Iceland, the production manager said five days after the first group training that he had "freed up an hour a day" by having Claude pull the essentials from the daily production reports. In late September, Mayock ran her first batch of ten journal entries through the last of three skills that together take her weekly transaction-level financial data import from a full workday down to what she estimates will be "an hour or two." It was, she added, "the most boring day of the week." If the estimate holds, that is about six hours a week, on the order of 300 hours a year.
What Icelandic Glacial's rollout shows
A few things from this engagement apply to any mid-sized company adopting Claude across more than one team.
Consolidate before you train. Two domains, a separate plan and individual accounts meant no shared projects, skills or connector setup, and no one to administer them. The first two weeks went to one workspace, and everything after depended on it.
Connect the system of record early, then make it reliable. NetSuite was live in week two. In week three a permissions rule stopped several users from connecting; a dedicated connector role and a written setup guide fixed that in an afternoon. Then Claude's NetSuite queries would not tie to the income statement. The fix was a skill that has Claude take the income statement from NetSuite's own report, by posting period, instead of querying transactions by date; deploying it to every seat fixed the results for everyone. The connector made NetSuite reachable; the skill made it trustworthy.
Let group sessions end. Once a team has taken off with the tool, standing sessions stop earning their slot. Office hours carried the rest.
What's next
Two builds kicked off in mid-September. The first is a monthly budget forecast engine for the finance team, built as a Claude plugin that draws expected trade spend from the Vividly connector. The second is a financial close build: a month-end checklist and account reconciliations tied to NetSuite balances, run inside Claude. Training is also expanding beyond finance and production, starting with the logistics team that asked for the Kuebix connector, and then sales.
In their words
"This has been a game changer for me... This whole thing is saving my brain power for when it's really needed."Jennifer Delaney, VP of Finance & Controller, Icelandic Glacial
About this story. Published with Icelandic Glacial's approval, September 2026. Quotes are taken from recorded working sessions between June and September 2026 and lightly edited for length. Usage figures are Icelandic Glacial's own, from its Claude admin analytics for the 90 days to September 24, 2026, and its spend report for June 25 to September 23, 2026.