Realize Your Brewery's Growth Strategy by Forecasting Your Future

By the end of 2019, more than 8,000 breweries were operating in the US, according to the Brewer’s Association. With hundreds upon hundreds of breweries entering the brewing industry each year, running your brewery on gut decisions just does not cut it anymore. You need to continually differentiate your brewery from competitors by running more efficient, reducing operational costs and actively searching for opportunities to grow and differentiate your brewery.

To run more efficiently, you need to have a complete picture of your brewery’s strengths and capabilities. This is where forecasting your brewery’s future can help you begin to achieve these goals.

How forecasting gives incredible insight into your business's future and can help you realize your growth strategy

Forecasting helps you predict your annual:

• Future sales orders

• Required inventory

• Financial requirements

Forecasting gives your business incredible insight into your brewery’s future based on past trends and current data. How, you may ask? If you can forecast the amount of sales orders your brewery should expect for the year based on past data, you can work backwards to determine the inventory your brewery needs to complete each sales order. And to take it one step further, if you know how much inventory you need, you can determine your invariable and inventory costs by analyzing employee salaries and cost sheets from your suppliers.

As you see, forecasting gives your business a better picture of your potential sales and financial position. With this incredible amount of information on your brewery’s financial position, you can strategically leverage it to develop and achieve your growth strategy.

How Night Shift Brewing Saved Thousands Forecasting Their Future

Night Shift Brewing is the perfect example of utilizing forecasting to gain a greater picture of their brewery’s strengths and capabilities, and using that information to reduce operational costs and search for new opportunities to grow.

Using our all-in-one beverage management software, Orchestrated, Night Shift Brewing was able to generate demand forecasts to complete their Materials Requirement Planning (MRP). Night Shift was able to determine the amount of key hops they needed to have to fulfill their demand forecasts.

Having this information before planning their production schedule for the next year, Night Shift was able to analyze their existing operations to reduce operational costs while increasing efficiency within the brewery. According to Phil Bate’s Night Shift’s Production Coordinator, within negotiations with hops suppliers, they were able to save thousands of dollars even though they ordered a larger supply of Hops by utilizing MRP.

I was able to use MRP to plan out and basically show our entire hop requirement for 2019 for all these key hops… Having that information when we went into the contract negotiations wound up saving us a significant sum of money.

Phil Bates

Production Coordinator at Night Shift Brewing

Not only did Night Shift reduce their operational costs, they also had a greater understanding of their financial position, which helped them determine their growth capacity in the coming year. Instead of running their brewery by the seat of their pants, they were able to plan out their production schedule ahead of time, giving them more time to focus on growing the business and crafting their growth strategy.

Conclusion

Forecasting is a powerful tool that your brewery should begin to prioritize as the process gives your business incredible insight into the future based on past trends and present data. By forecasting, your brewery can begin to run more efficiently, reduce operation costs and improve production planning, so you can focus more on growing your business.

Discover how our all-in-one beverage management solution, Orchestrated, can help you gain complete transparency over your business by speaking to one of our experts today.