Keep Your Business Flowing with Production Planning for Your Brewery or Distillery

Between skyrocketing can prices, raw ingredient shortages and environmental concerns, craft breweries and distilleries regularly contend with production obstacles and supply chain challenges.   

An unexpected lack of ingredients and production materials can disrupt business and hurt your relationship with distributors, retailers and customers. Your output must be consistent to ensure your best product retains shelf space.  

A Cloud-based ERP designed for the beverage industry can automate and enhance tedious administrative tasks, material requirements planning and demand forecasting for breweries and distilleries. With it, businesses owners can optimize production and regain the time needed to innovate and refine that perfect brew.   

Brewmasters and master distillers may look through sales histories and production demand to determine which raw materials to stock at what quantity. Unfortunately, basing production around fluctuating sales histories and seasonal demand is prone to error and may to delayed production times, inaccurate ingredient quantities and missed shipping deadlines to customers.   

Digital material requirements planning and demand forecasting enable brewers and distillers to avoid costly setbacks while reducing waste. This is especially important for fast-growing businesses that may encounter unforeseen problems as they scale.   

Enavate has partnered with Drink-IT to help small to midsized breweries, and distilleries avoid costly material requirement planning problems. Enavation Cloud: Drink-IT by NORRIQ is a Cloud-driven ERP offering built on Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Business Central and designed to help beverage businesses increase revenue, boost productivity and capture growth.  

5 Ways Production Management Can Help Breweries and Distilleries Boost Capacity  

Various factors go into getting your craft beverage into a customers’ hands. A technology offering with production management capability can help you optimize your inventory and gain insight into your operations. The right software will automate manual tasks and remove the guesswork from your production schedule, so you can spend more time focusing on your passion.   

Improving production capacity planning calls for the following:  

1. Digital Master Production Schedule – A digital production schedule allows you to make data-driven scheduling decisions and control which orders your team should brew at what time and by which production line. You should also be able to make necessary adjustments at any point so that you can account for last-minute changes.  

1. Eliminate Stockouts – Stockouts put production on hold. You need real-time visibility into production needs to avoid these, so you’re not blindly ordering supplies. For example, say you have a recurring order of barley from your supplier. However, barley production is forecast to be down 36 percent this year, putting this ingredient at risk of being delivered later than usual, available in partial quantity or not at all. The right technology will forecast how much barley you will need for upcoming productions and compare it with how much you have in stock. With this comparison, you will know at a glance when you need to find secondary sources for your main ingredients and how to increase orders to sustain you for longer, avoiding the possibility of stockouts.  
2. Avoid Overstocking – It’s not unusual for breweries or distilleries to order more than they need of raw material or packaging “just in case,” only to have that extra stock sit there for months, untouched. When you purchase too much, your carrying costs go up, and your collateral gets tied up – often in perishable goods. If you don’t use all of your ingredients before they expire, you risk wasting valuable resources and losing money.   
3. Improved Operational Oversight – You need visibility into everything in your order-to-cash cycles, from raw materials purchasing and production to quality control and invoicing. Without that visibility, you can’t identify areas that need improvement and make decisions about future batches based on hard data instead of best guesses.  
4. Integrated Finances – Integrating your finances across sales, production, purchasing and invoicing will increase efficiency and productivity. This integration will also give insight into duplicate efforts across departments and avoid manual data entry errors and mistakes.

Production management software designed for breweries and distilleries will help tie your business together so you can gain more control over your finances, production processes and materials planning.   

A technology offering such as Enavation Cloud: Drink-IT by NORRIQ can help you avoid costly setbacks and optimize purchasing and production. Reach out to one of our beverage experts today.