Hi all,
just looking for some general advice from those of you who manage production and scheduling.
Previously, I had a big old spreadsheet with all our tanks showing brew days and packaging days (just inputted manually), alongside all SKUs with stock levels and burn rates, enabling me to see when a line was going to run out, and then I could easily work backwards to schedule a packaging day and brew day accordingly.
I then moved scheduling over to Breww, but a couple of months on, and I am finding the scheduling is taking me way longer…mostly I would put this down to visibility issues.
I work on two screens with the Stock Availability Forecast on one screen and the Batch Schedule on the other. But looking up each SKU individually (I might have five that come from one single brew) one month at a time (I need to open up each month to see exactly when we are due to run out), it becomes really difficult to then go in and out of the batch schedule and plan packaging as needed, especially as the batch schedule ‘refreshes’ to either the start of the year (on a year view) or the current month (if you are looking a couple of months ahead on the month view). The number of clicks alone and getting back to the right place and right tank seems to really suck up time.
This combined with not being able to see ‘special orders’ that might wipe out your stock in one go (appreciate you can do this on the stock availability screen too, but again it means viewing in another place/tab) and no kind of manual override on burn rates (seasonal variation, new customer group who only take two product lines etc) means I am now looking to revert to a hybrid schedule: Use my old spreadsheet for determining what I need and when, then transferring over (probably a couple of weeks at a time) to Breww for our brewers to have eyes on the plan for the week or so ahead.
Appreciate this is a long thread, but would love to hear how other breweries manage their schedule, whether you have made it work entirely with Breww, or like me…use a spreadsheet/different system alongside.
Thank you!
I had asked Breww to add a feature that would take the sales data and combine it with data like the average time to brew and rack a particular product, and then make suggestions to set Breww dates. Then when it comes time to rack the beer it would suggest a mix between kegs and cans in order to equalize the days on hand of inventory. See Automatically suggest what to brew, what to package and when to do it based on forecasted available stock. I guess it did not receive sufficient up-votes. We export the weekly sales information to Excel, where I merge it into our Demand Planning forecasting tool (also in Excel) once a week. It spits out suggested start dates and as we get closer to that date our head brewer puts it into the system.
The sad fact is that nearly all this data is already available in Breww, and it would “close the loop” on their entire software system. All you’d have to do is confirm the suggested dates and away it would go - ordering the raw materials, scheduling the tanks, etc. No more guesswork.
Our tool was created by my brother, who managed demand planning optimization for a number of warehouses at a major pharmacutical company. We only track the “core” products we produce, fill in those brew dates, and then schedule our “one-offs” and collabs around those dates. it’s made it super-simple. you’ll see in the above thread that the Breww guys are pitching this as a benefit of their system, when in fact I am forced to do everything manually outside of their system and I could get the same sell-through data from QuickBooks. However, their export report is certainly helpful and makes my job of manual integration a bit easier than using the accounting reports. I just wish they’d look at the full integration because I think it would be a MAJOR feature differentiator from their competition. In the end i think its about how many of their customers see a need and would give it the “up votes” needed to justify development. But our data over the last 6 months shows significant improvement in stock availability, equipment utilization and inventory carrying costs. My belief is that many breweries are too busy brewing beer to comprehend the benefits such a tool would bring to their business, and how much work it takes off the shoulders of their brewer.
Keith Wehmeyer
HopLore Brewing