Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68Brewery Business System Overview Here are some key questions and considerations whether you are reviewing your existing processes and business systems or selecting a new business systems solution. Administration Efficiency Is the system optimised and developed for the brewing industry? For example, when you process a transaction such as stock transfer or a sales order your system should automati- cally capture and post the relevant duty information so that the production of your HMRC reporting can be generated automatically and accurately at the end of each reporting period. Are your Finance processes fully integrated with your Purchasing, Sales, Production and Distribution processes? Often breweries operate one system for finance and one or more systems to cater for their operational processes. This often causes issues and results in your finance team spending a significant proportion of their time duplicating data entry and trying to reconcile differences between the systems rather than adding value to the financial management and control of your business within a fully integrated software solution. Does it have out-of-the-box, best practice functionality that helps you to optimise your administration processes? Credit control management is a good example here. Your system must be able to automatically calculate the debt owed to you by each customer and provide you with a clear report on any outstanding debt before you process yet another expensive sales order to a customer with a poor payment record. Does the system allow you to calculate and manage your actual product costs? Think about your total direct costs of production, raw materials, duty etc as well as your indirect costs such as administration, storage and distribution overheads. Your system should be able to automatically capture and allocate these costs to provide you with a true picture of your product profitability and avoid the danger of any hidden costs. Production Control Are you still managing your production planning on spreadsheets or whiteboards? Your business system should allow you to optimise your production plan by producing a demand forecast in your system that in turn will calculate a Master Production Schedule from which individual production orders can be created, controlled and updated efficiently and flexibly to accommodate those last minute changes to plans. Are you struggling to cope with demand compared with the capacity in your brewery? This seems to be a very common theme throughout the industry and the fitting in of new fermenting vessels and conditioning tanks into small spaces has become something of an art form. A production planning system with effective capacity planning functionality will allow you to optimise the usage of your vessel capacity throughout the brewing process and maximise your production output. Do you ever run out of raw materials that you thought you had in stock which then causes a delay in production? This could be anything from hops to bottle labels. Having an efficient Materials Requirements Planning (MRP) solution is vital to make sure that you always have enough (but not too much) stock on hand to meet your production requirements. Your system should be able to calculate the usage of stocks automatically in the production process and propose purchase orders for new stock based on actual consumption and re-order levels. Continued on page 48 46 BREWING & BEVERAGE INDUSTRIES BUSINESS Business process optimisation for your brewery by David Ashmore, Norriq Showcase IT & BUSINESS SYSTEMS Having the right fully integrated business system means greater efficiency and profitability for your brewery and provides the scalable platform on which to manage, grow and expand your business. Some of the key operational areas that you will inevitably need to focus on and improve include efficiency of administration, production control and the ability to track your products and containers throughout the supply chain. 46_Layout 1 30/10/2016 15:32 Page 1