How are Alberta breweries handling keg deliveries through Connect Logistics? When running the CLS sales import our keg sales are not being marked complete. This appears to be because a keg cannot be auto assigned to the delivery.
If you have stock of that product at the correct Connect Logistics site in Breww, it should be able to be auto-assigned and the delivery marked as complete. Does this happen with all orders or just some? If all, you might have an incorrect setting. Either way, feel free to open a support ticket and we can have a look for you.
Hi Matt, I believe this is happening because we are using tracked kegs, although we’ve only had one sale of a tracked keg go through the system so far. All of our other CLS sales have been small pack, which the auto-assign has been working well with.
I chatted with your AI agent and the response I got was “If you are using your own tracked kegs and casks, you will always need to manually assign them.” I guess I’m a little confused on how the brewery warehouse to CLS warehouse to customer and back to our warehouse workflow is supposed to work.
Maybe we missed something when we moved our tracked kegs to the CLS Warehouse in Breww? That was done with the Move Stock feature in the mobile app. I understand that it’s impossible to know which kegs are at which accounts when they go through the CLS warehouse, but I would assume that tracked kegs sent to CLS would somehow be assigned to the CLS warehouse? At a minimum, that would let us know which kegs are out with CLS.
Hi Ryan, thanks for the extra info.
That’s right, you can’t auto-assign returnable kegs to orders, as Breww needs to ensure the specific physical container used matches what’s recorded in the system. This means they need to be manually assigned to each delivery.
I can see how this creates a challenge when working with a third-party logistics provider. You’re correct that moving your tracked kegs to the CLS warehouse helps you know which kegs are out with them in general, but you won’t know which specific containers have been used for which orders (Unless they provide that information?).
The difficulty is that auto-assigning tracked containers to imported orders would essentially be assigning them randomly, which would create inaccurate data about their actual locations - potentially worse than not having that granular information at all.
One potential solution would be a feature that allows you to record tracked containers as being “with a third-party fulfilment service” without needing to assign them to specific orders. This would give you visibility that they’re out with CLS while avoiding false location data. However, I’ll be honest that this would be quite a niche feature and not straightforward to build, but certainly a feature request we would consider if it were beneficial to lots of customers.
In practice, I imagine that most breweries using third-party logistics tend to use non-returnable containers in Breww for these sales, sometimes tracking the specific container codes separately outside the system if needed. But if anyone else has found a workflow that works well for tracked kegs with third-party fulfilment services, please do share!
Hi Ryan,
It looks like there is a feature request for a similar situation that might be solved by the same solution. If you think this would help you, you could vote and comment:
Thanks,
Matt
We started shipping barcoded kegs to CLS a few weeks ago and they haven’t been sold yet. If we see the problem Ryan is having, it’s going to be a huge issue. How can we fix this in the interim? I can’t see how to convert that tracked keg into a non-returnable?
If we can’t track the kegs going through CLS, it defeats the purpose of keg tracking for us as the majority of our kegs go through CLS. I don’t care who purchases the keg, but I would like to know where it is and and how long it was out. That will make it easier to plan on how big the fleet needs to be.
Hello,
Totally agree with Chase-Gordon on this. Whether its done as a 3rd party fulfillment or perhaps as a Keg Status setting for product transferred to CLS. We could set a flag for auto-assigning on a FIFO basis of kegs at CLS - with this giving batch tracking and quantity tracking without specifically accurate customer tracking. To not be able to complete orders with CLS due to inability to assign kegs is otherwise a huge hit on the AGLC functionality.
The relevant and useful information would be that so long as CLS does FIFO (they are supposed to but don’t always) we would know the count and the batch at a customer, even if we don’t know the keg specifically - and it would solve the auto-assign issue. The flag could be set for any supplier, weather 1st, 2nd or 3rd party if a user wanted to work off of batches and quantities instead of specific units, meaning the value would extend well beyond just CLS/AGLC customers.
Also, we do know when we get our tracked empties back from CLS, but its an information void between seeing an order and getting our empty back.
Thanks for the extra info and I’m sorry that you for see an issue here.
To “convert” a returnable container into a non-returnable, you would need to make use of the "Packaging from containers” feature. Go to Containers → Actions & tools → Package from containers.
I’m just getting to this feature and it’s a very tedious function. I can’t select a batch number or location to make it faster. It would save a lot of time if I could filter by location. Then I could at least convert a little faster, instead of having to transpose the stock list onto the convert list.
Are you able to fix our problem with CLS quickly (automate FIFO or something) or are we going to need to convert everything in CLS to non-returnable? Honestly, I might just abandon keg tracking as it’s going to end up being such a hassle. It was one of the features I was really looking forward to using. We’re going to have errors with which kegs go to CLS and which don’t if we aren’t scanning them to verify which kegs are shipped, too much chance for human error with some stuff scanned in and some not. I already had to fix something that mistakenly went to CLS from scanned stock and it’s time consuming to go get a list of every keg number for what we have in stock to see which ones went out.
The ideal solution here would be the feature request I mentioned above, which we do plan on doing in the near future. There won’t be anything we can do in the meantime, I’m afraid. You might do best to not use the keg tracking features for the CLS kegs until we’ve built the full related feature. I’m sorry that there’s no better solution right now.
Blindman uses both tracked and untracked kegs. When we ship kegs to CLS we make sure we are sending un-tracked kegs, which are tagged in Breww as “Connect Logistics” kegs. To achieve this we either (a) package the kegs in Breww as un-tracked (most common way) or (b) convert tracked kegs to untracked kegs by using the “Package from Container” method. This second method is very clunky and we try to avoid it. Luckily, we usually ship to CLS the same day that we produce the kegs, so in this case option (a) above works, and it’s very easy and not at all time consuming.
It would be lovely if there were a way for us to use tracked kegs everywhere, not just for our direct delivery accounts. I just have a hard time envisioning how this could work though, unless CLS were an active partner in the process. They would have to scan kegs out for orders using the Breww keg tracking stickers, which seems like it could be a big ask and a big potential headache when there are problems (i.e. what happens when a keg won’t scan). Who knows though… we pay CLS to do all kind of things for us… maybe this could be one of those things.
The alternative of “semi-tracking” (as described in the feature request linked to earlier) seems like a good idea, but I don’t know if it totally solves the issue to be honest.
One bit of automation that could be helpful is for kegs to automatically convert to non-returnable kegs upon being stock-transferred to Connect. This might (?) be generically useful for other Breww customers as well, as I’m sure a lot of distributors aren’t necessarily interested in tracking kegs for their suppliers. In general, if the process for tracked/non-returnable conversion were made quicker and easier in general, this would be quite helpful.
Just my $.02. I’ll put in a feature request for this too.
Dave
Here is the feature request - let me know if this should be tweaked at all.