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 6848 BREWING & BEVERAGE INDUSTRIES BUSINESS How do you manage your recipes? Is this done off-line, in a spreadsheet? Again, this should be controlled in your system using a Bill of Materials to manage the raw materials used in the various stages of the production of the beer itself as well as the packaging materials required to produce your finished goods. This not only ensures consistency in the production of your range of beers, but also captures the associated financial information to allow for accurate product costing. Tracking and Traceability How many of your own casks or kegs do you lose in a year? Are you able to track a cask right the way through your production process, sales order and delivery to the end customer and its return back to the brewery? Your business system should allow you to manage and control this process at a level that matches your business needs. This may be at a basic level using manual controls and simply tracking the physical number of casks going out to each customer and matching them off against the quantity returned. Alternatively, this may be controlled at a fully automated, detailed level using scanning and mobile devices to track a specific cask at all stages of the process (from goods receipt to production filling to inventory management to sales order fulfilment to customer delivery with signed proof of delivery to returns order and back to goods receipt). A key question for your business is what are you going to do with this information? Charging a deposit for kegs and returnable bottles is commonplace in many countries, but in the UK the default and accepted business practice throughout the industry is not to charge a deposit. So how are you going to tackle one of your top customers who owes you 20 casks? Are you going to refuse to deliver any more beer until they return the empty casks? Are you going to charge them a deposit on the casks until they return them? Are you just going to ignore the problem and hope that the casks turn up in future? If you get a grip of your cask fleet and reduce your cask losses, how much is this going to save you over a year? Answering some of these questions may help you to determine the level of cask tracking sophistication you really need for your business. Also, tracking is not just about the casks, more importantly, it is about product traceability. Are you able trace the lot or batch of hops that you used in a specific production order to produce a specific finished product that was delivered to a specific customer on a specific sales order? The business system for your brewery should not only be able to provide you with full product traceability from raw material to the end customer, but should also provide full reverse traceability from the end customer to right the way back to the original raw materials used. In summary, do your current business systems provide you with the functionality and controls to optimise your administrative, production and traceability processes or are they causing you problems? If they are causing you problems, then it’s time to start reviewing your existing systems and processes to see if they can be improved. If not, then it’s time to start looking for a new business systems solution. Showcase IT & BUSINESS SYSTEMS David Ashmore is a Director of NORRIQ, software owner of Drink-IT; a fully integrated Microsoft Dynamics software solution designed specifically for breweries. Drink-IT is used by over 90 breweries in over 45 countries around the world. Find out more about Drink-IT at www.drink-it.com or request a demo at: info@drink-it.com Business process optimisation for your brewery Continued from Page 46 The next issue of will be published in late FEBRUARY 2017 Featuring Showcase INGREDIENTS Showcase MARKETING Showcase BOTTLES & CANS Showcase IN THE CELLAR Malts, hops, yeast and any other raw materials which contribute to the finished product! Corporate branding on clothing, promotional literature, and other marketing material, including websites Retail drinks containers including bottle and can labelling and decoration Cellar and back-bar equipment and services, right up to (but not including) point-of-dispense on the bar Plus the most up-to-date PREVIEW of who’s showing what at SIBA’s big annual event in SHEFFIELD EDITORIAL DEADLINE : Thursday 2nd February ADVERTISING ARTWORK: Tuesday 7th February 48_Layout 1 30/10/2016 15:37 Page 1