EKegPlus Integration

With more breweries taking up the new Close Brothers EKegPlus container rental model, it would benefit brewers if BREWW and the EKegPlus portal (PlusPortal) were integrated. Including mapping of brands and the customer database.

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We would benefit from this integration.

Would be a massive + for our team

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Thanks everyone for the feedback and votes on this. It would be useful to hear about what information you’d like Breww to send over to EKegPlus and what information Breww should pull in from EKegPlus? And at what point this information exchange should occur, e.g. racking, delivery assignment, delivery completion, etc.

With this, we can work with Close Brothers to get a solution built. Thanks.

Just starting to use Ekeg Plus now. Think integration would be useful but will post more specific info once we’ve use it a bit.

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This would really help

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Luke,

How could we sync the systems so we can fill, then track the casks to location. For complete production traceability and also enable cask tracking facility in one place. Giving us sight of the individual cask and when we need to pick them up. Not sure which way we would need to do this? Or how?

We’ve spoken to the team at EKegPlus and do plan to add an integration to allow syncing of beers between the two systems.

We’ve also spoken to them about sharing the fill and delivery data, but this gets far more complicated and to be honest, we didn’t really come up with an answer. The difficulties stem from which system is used to confirm a container is filled:

  • If you tell Breww a container is filled - Breww could tell EKegPlus, but they are not comfortable with taking this information from us as this is how they bill you. Any disputes could then get complicated and to be honest, we don’t really want to get in the middle of a billing dispute between you and EKegPlus either! If this part could be resolved, then we would need to add support for scanning their RFID tags to our app, which is something that we haven’t yet investigated. We’re not sure to be honest if this would even be possible with the hardware built into normal Androids and iPhones, but it might be.
  • If you tell EKegPlus a container is filled - They could tell us a create the racking in Breww. Again in theory this could be done, but it creates a number of issues. Their app only currently (as far as I remember) asks for the batch number, but in Breww, we know which vessel you’re racking from (as a batch can be in multiple). We also ask lots of other questions along the way, such as stock items used, delayed releases (i.e. cask conditioning), etc. We can also validate that you’re not trying to rack 1,000L when you only have 800L in the vessel. If we accepted racking data from them, we’re concerned that this could cause no-end of problems if what’s given to us doesn’t pass our validation, and this would result in the two systems then being out of sync anyway.

We didn’t manage to come to a perfect solution to the above but would love to hear anyone else’s ideas on this, as we’re keen to work with you, and EKegPlus to make an integration that saves everyone time and reduces mistakes. One possible idea would be that you complete the racking in both apps, but some data is shared, for example:

  • In the EKegPlus app/device, you confirm you’re doing a Breww racking of batch 123 and start scanning containers.
  • After racking in EKegPlus, you go to the Breww app and import this data (maybe the EKegPlus produces an on-screen barcode, which you scan on the Breww App). This could put you directly into the racking process in Breww for the right batch and have all the container codes loaded in. You can then complete the process in Breww, with all of our validation, stock items, delayed releases, etc.

This would mean that Breww knew the container codes and could report deliveries to your customers to EKegPlus and save some duplicated work. Again this would require EKegPlus to “trust” Breww to give accurate data and I know that having accurate location data is extremely important to them.


To summarise, I think a simple integration on the beers (and possibly customers list) side could be done and this would save you a small amount of time, but in all honestly, I don’t think this is the big win here that everyone who’s voted for this is looking for. We’re going to be launching an API that EKegPlus could use for this (we’ve been in talks with them about this).

To me, the big ticket item here is reducing the duplication of racking/delivery data and this will rely not just on technical work from both the Breww and EKegPlus team, but EKegPlus to “trust” us to give them data that they can then bill you upon, and for this, it’s over to them to decide what they’re comfortable with really. If we make any progress on this with EKegPlus directly, we’ll let you know.

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Yes please! Great idea

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:warning: If you’d like to see this integration, please can you let us know what you would like the integration to actually do.

There have been many comments/votes requesting an integration, but given the limitations that I’ve mentioned in detail in this post, we can’t actually build the obvious beneficial thing.

If you’d like to vote for this, please also let us know what you’d like it to actually do :smile: At the moment, we’re not able to build anything as we don’t know what you want “the integration” to actually do. Thank you.

Hi Luke, been giving this some thought.

I like your suggestion below. If the team were able to rack using the Ekeg scanner and select they were racking a certain batch/batch number and then have this scan data imported into Breww to ‘finish’ the racking that would work nicely and save a small amount of admin time and potentially stop errors between what’s racked on the Ekeg scanner and what’s racked in Breww.

The next bit to sort is the scanning for deliveries.

It would be great to have visibility of Ekeg containers in trade, the age of those kegs and how long they’ve been with a customer within Breww so we can schedule uplifts and hopefully end the keg cycles sooner to reduce our costs. I would have thought the best way to do this was to continue using Ekeg to scan out containers for deliveries as their scanners support the rfid tags but have the data imported into Breww. This would then give you the visibility of containers in trade as I think Breww do this much better than the Ekeg Plus portal and it’s much easier for us to have everything in one place.

In short I think the best way may be to have the customer databases shared between Breww and Ekeg by pushing customer data from Breww to Ekeg.
Continue to use the Ekeg scanner for all racking and deliveries and having this data pushed to Breww to have better visibility of containers in trade and hopefully reduce cycle times.

Hope that helps.

Cheers

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Hi, I mirror the comments above from @jack-tavare. This integration would be great for us.

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Another suggestion on this.

We have our own keg washer/filler on site and as such can collect empty Ekegs & casks from the wild which we then scan back into our own stockpile for use later on. It would be great if the stockpile on the Ekeg Plus Portal could link to Breww and update the stock of empty kegs within Breww. This would then make packaging planning much easier so we could see within Breww our exact on site empty keg/cask stock.

Thanks

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Integration with Breww would be very beneficial for our business. Just to highlight again what @jack-tavare has mentioned above.

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