In the old version of the phone app, if you selected a target location and scanned a keg it would automatically move it to the target regardless of where it is.
If it was at a customer then scanning it back to “brewery” would automatically empty the keg and move the keg into the brewery.
If the keg was either full or empty and currently at a satellite location it would move it to the brewery in its current state (either full or empty).
While this had limitations, the biggest being whether the keg was being returned full as a returned product from a customer, this part of the app at least had a predictable outcome.
The new one just broke all that.
NOW, you have to select where the keg is coming from.
But often times kegs are returned (or sent) to a location not knowing where they came from.
For instance at our brewery kegs come back from a customer and they come back from another of our locations, sometimes full, sometimes empty.
Regardless if they come back here they get dealt with.
But we don’t often know by looking at a keg, where it came from without searching the last known location using a number of keyclicks, mouse clicks, or finger swipes, a process that takes appreciable amounts of time.
I will say that the current process of moving kegs around is worse off than it was before.
What is everyone else’s opinion on this?
Have others figured out a better way to use the app?
As it stands, I think this is a serious downgrade, especially for operations like us that keep stock at multiple locations.
One of the options for source location is (it is for me) “returning empties from customers” or something. It’s another click, but you don’t, I don’t think, need to know exactly where the container has been.
Thanks for the comments, Henry, and I’m sorry that you’ve not found this new tool an improvement yet.
I’ve moved this to the help section as this isn’t currently a feature request, but if it results in a feature request, we can move it back (or create another thread for the request).
I must admit, that I disagree with this. I feel that what you’ve described is, in fact, not a predictable outcome and that’s partly why we changed it. Before, if you scanned a keg, depending on where it came from (a customer or a different location), it might be moved filled or returned empty by Breww. We felt that mistakes could easily be made as the tool could do two different things depending on where the keg was before. Now, it’s always clear what will happen. And if part of your problem is that you don’t know where the keg was before, it sounds like this is fixing potential mistakes for you.
When you are moving kegs in the real world, presumably you know if they are full of sellable beer, or empty and need cleaning. Based on this, you know if you should use the returning-from-customers or moving-between-locations feature of the new tool?
We feel that the new process is an improvement, but we’re happy to hear the feedback and see what others think too, and see if any improvements can be made. If anyone else reading this has any further thoughts, please do comment below.
Kegs get returned from a customer empty, scanned and get put into a collection location.
Then they get retuned to the brewery at a later time, and scanned again. This requires two scans, but often the first return scan is missed, so that keg still looks like it is at the customer.
When it arrives at the brewery to get washed and re-filled, the brewery operator has no idea where the keg has been, and if the transfer scan is rejected because the first scan was missed, then that starts a time consuming process of figuring out where that keg was.
In the old method, the brewery operator would successfully scan a keg back to the brewery because it simply would have been “returned” from the customer.
Also, in the old version, Breww would warn you if it still thought the keg was full (also from a previous mis-scan) and if you wanted to override the next step (usually filling) but that seems to have been re-wrapped into this new procedure.
If we had an option of Any site for the Source location, do you think this would solve your issue? This way, you’d only need to know that the keg was either from a customer or from one of your sites.
I think you’re referring to a different feature here - when racking kegs, if you scan a keg that Breww believes to still be with a customer, you’ll be prompted to confirm that it is, in fact, back with you and should be “emptied” in Breww before being refilled? If so, this hasn’t changed and is still part of the racking process, as before. There’s never been such a prompt on the move tool (and this is part of why we changed it; you could so easily make mistakes as it would do different things on the assumption you were doing everything correctly and hadn’t missed a step before).
There’s a step to return kegs from the customers to a collection location.
And then another step to move kegs from the collection location to the brewery. Right?
If I’ve missed the first step, them I can’t move the keg from collection to brewery because Breww doesn’t know it’s at collection?
In which case, it must be (according to Breww) at a customer. So why don’t I just return from customer to brewery at that point? I don’t need to know which customer, or do I?