Software Keeps Beer Flowing

Every year, Scottish Courage Ltd. makes millions of liters of Foster's Lager, John Smith's Bitter, Newcastle Brown Ale, and other beers. Production planning and scheduling is a monumental task, but the brewery gets help from enterprise applications.

Scottish Courage uses supply-chain software from Agilisys Inc. to help it fine-tune its production process so it can maintain lower inventories of raw materials while still keeping up with customer demand. The company runs the software at five of its largest breweries and plans to install it at HP Bulmers Holding plc, a hard-cider manufacturer Scottish Courage recently acquired.

Scottish Courage began implementing Agilisys' software about three years ago, around the same time it began using SAP R/3 apps, including SAP Advanced Planning and Optimization. "At the start of the Agilisys project, it was always the Cinderella project to SAP," says Chris Wallace, senior project manager of IS at Scottish Courage. "Now it's one of the first things we look at."

That's largely because the software has proven itself to the brewmasters on the factory floor who tend not to have much faith in planning software. "When we first put Agilisys in, it was coming up to Christmas, and the software was telling us things like, a week from next Wednesday we're going to run out of beer so we won't need people on the production lines," Wallace recalls. "It only took a few times of bringing people in unnecessarily before we realized this was a pretty powerful tool."

The software has also helped tighten planning in the brewery's filtration processes, where mature beer is filtered just before packaging. Before, the packaging lines would, on average, sit idle 5% to 10% of the time, waiting for filtration processes to finish. Now, at the Royal Brewery in Manchester, England, idle time has been cut to about 1%, Wallace says.

The brewery is considering adding Agilisys optimization tools and plans to put in Web-browser functionality so employees can access schedules from the production lines at the breweries.