As well as planning your batches in Breww, you can also plan what product will be packaged from these batches. This great tool allows you to help forecast your stock levels by setting what products you plan on racking from your batches in advance without limiting what products you can rack; think of this as a guide for your production and sales teams. Creating a planned packaging will enable you to print your labels in advance, reserve non-returnable numbers to use when racking, and optionally, allow you to create pre-orders by creating orders that are scheduled to be delivered to the customer after a planned packaging for products that you do not currently have enough stock of, without this being blocked as an oversell.
Creating a planned packaging
A planned packaging can be created in at any one of three times on a batch in Breww, these are:
- When creating a planned batch
- When viewing an already planned batch
- On a batch in progress
Creating a planned packaging when creating a planned batch
Upon creating a planned batch, there is also the option to add any planned packagings. This will require you to enter the product, quantity, planned packaging date and release date. Our How to create a batch in production discusses this in more detail.
Creating a planned packaging on a planned batch
To create a planned packaging on a planned batch, head to the Batch schedule from the production dashboard and select a batch. Here, there will be a ‘+’ symbol that you can select under Planned packagings.
Alternatively, you can also select the Planned packagings tab from within a batch and then select Add planned packaging.
Following one of the processes above will present a series of options where you can enter what you plan to package, the quantity you plan on packaging, the date you plan on packaging your products, and an expected release date for the stock.
You are not restricted to a single packaging format and can select to distribute that batch amongst various products for the batch. I have planned to package multipacks, casks and kegs in this example.
By selecting to view the batch, you can organise your planned packaging list in order of priority by dropping and dragging the planned packaging. In the example below, I have racked the 24 X 330ml can product, showing that this planned packaging volume has now been packaged.
Create a planned packaging on an in-progress batch
If your batch is In-progress, you can still add planned packagings to this batch by selecting to view the batch, scrolling down to the Planned packagings tab, and selecting Planned packagings.
Raising orders for products on a planned package
When selecting an out-of-stock product on an order, this will display in red as having ‘0 Available’.
If you do not have a planned packaging, and you have the Prevent over-selling of stock setting turned on in Settings → Order/invoice settings, then Breww will prevent you from raising an order for the product. However, if you have a planned package, you can raise an order for this product, provided the order’s scheduled delivery date is after the date of the planned package. In the example below, my planned package is for 10 kegs on 19/12/2023, with the scheduled delivery for 20/12/2023.
This means Breww sees this order as being possible, as you plan to have stock by the date of delivery. This will show the item in blue and as being ‘Available’ when raising an order, or it will still show in red, with a bracketed ‘max’ figure. This will depend on your Order/invoice settings and what you have selected for the dropdown under Which stock figure would you like displayed for a product when adding it to an order? (If you have chosen to only use the Available figure here, then this will still show as ‘0 Available’).
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It is worth noting that if you have failed to actually package your product in Breww by the date of the planned packaging, then you will not be able to raise any orders, and Breww will see this as out of stock. This is because on reaching the date of the planned package, Breww is now looking at ‘reality’, and the planned stock on the date of a planned package should become ‘actual’ stock.