Craft Brew Alliance – Brewing Supply Chain Success
Challenge
Craft Brew Alliance is one of the oldest craft breweries in the United States. Over the past 15 years, the company has grown significantly through acquisitions of other breweries and its own organic initiatives.
With the acquisitions came new supply chains and the company’s supply chain infrastructure was stretched to the limit. CBA lacked a centralised planning process across all its breweries and its supply chain functions were disjointed. Capacity, inventory and sales and operations planning were non-existent for the most part.
CBA was relying on outdated forecasting techniques to manage its forecast across 180 products for 575 wholesalers. It was time to move away from manual processes and spreadsheets to a digital integrated business planning platform.
Solution
Craft Brew Alliance implemented the digital supply chain platform Logility to help decrease costs, improve efficiency and support more profitable growth.
The solution allows CBA to leave behind the manual processes, spreadsheets and paper-based interactions with suppliers. With Logility, the company shares forecasts electronically with core suppliers, packaging, raw materials and freight to better plan, budget and contract for the coming year.
Impact
With greater visibility and better planning, Craft Brew Alliance can compete in the beverage markets as though it is a much larger company. Logility has helped the company transition from a distribution centre driven distribution network to a direct ship model. It has also facilitated the formalisation of the S&OP process to drive better business decision making.
Since implementing Logility, CBA has seen continued growth of more than 12%. In addition, the company has seen immediate benefits in its customer service levels, increasing from around 88% to consistently at or above 90%.
By using the platform to identify industry classifications and set optimal time-phased inventory parameters, it has improved inventory management and increased inventory turns to an impressive average of 40+ per year.
