Let’s take a look at medium-sized craft breweries (who produce between 20k and 100k BBL annually) and the most common business challenges they face.
As you grow, your brewery will have an increasing need for a robust financial and distribution application. As your production grows, so does your brewery’s need for a management system with greater functionality. Solutions such as Microsoft Dynamics® or QuickBooks Online integrated with VicinityBrew provide a powerful brewery management software solution for growing breweries.
In this blog, we will talk about the top four growing pains for medium-sized craft breweries – and their solutions.
Growing Pain: Siloed Quality Tracking
Solution: Incorporating Quality Data in Your Brew Log
Breweries need a solution with the ability to store and track all QC test results by brew and recipe, so you can review test results over a period of time and by recipe. With VicinityBrew, brewers have the ability to adjust recipes on the fly based on the results of quality tests. Brands that require significant adjustments can be easily identified and adjusted for future production if needed.
Growing Pain: Incomplete Costing Analysis
Solution: Complete Production Tracking for True Cost of Goods Sold
Look for a financial system that allows you to calculate accurate production costs by style and compare them to sales activity. By tying the actual production cost to a brand, such as a seasonal brew, brewers gain a better understanding of where profit margins lie. Having this depth of cost analysis helps breweries to make strategic decisions such as reviewing vendor options, adjusting the selling price of the product, or, if necessary, discontinuing a poor performing recipe, and thus become a more profitable business.
Growing Pain: Static Excel Production Schedule
Solution: Implementing a Dynamic, Integrated Schedule
Connect production scheduling with your other brewery operations with an integrated Material Requirements Planning (MRP) tool. The production schedule can be derived from an MRP tool reading directly from sales orders or forecasts so that all demand for an item is considered during scheduling. If planned production is not in sync with demand for a given item, the system automatically notifies the scheduler. Breweries need to be able to make scheduling changes in real time and communicate these changes to as many departments as necessary, such as purchasing. Keeping everyone informed helps departments set priorities for production, quality, purchasing, and more. VicinityBrew takes the headaches out of production scheduling.
Growing Pain: Time Consuming, Manual Data Entry
Solution: Bypass Manual Data Entry by Utilizing Barcode Data Collection
It is important to find a solution that supports mobile or barcode data collection. Breweries who are producing at a medium to large-sized scale, roughly over 20k BBL, need to record production data in real time. As your production volume accelerates, maintaining records in a timely manner becomes increasingly difficult. As you evaluate your options to streamline recording data in the brewhouse, it’s important to find a proven solution, as well as audit your current processes, to identify any opportunities to increase efficiency or simplify future implementations. Not doing either of these may cost your brewery greatly in the future. Barcode data collection is a big step, so make sure your manual process is buttoned up prior to automating it with barcode data collection.
If you would like to learn more about VicinityBrew software or want to schedule a demo, contact us today!