How brewers can use tech to plan around tank resource constraints
BROCHURE
No matter the size of the brewery operation, there is no way to get around the importance of scheduling tanks efficiently. Each stage of the brewing process is time-sensitive and must be properly scheduled to maintain proper specifications for beer recipes and to prevent late or unfulfilled delivery orders.
Large-scale brewers, or macro-brewers, who produce millions of hectoliters of beer annually, use dedicated tanks for maturation, storage, and filtration—but these tanks must be emptied and cleaned for the next batch to come through the brewing process.
Micro-brewers, or craft brewers, who produce six million barrels of beer (or less) annually, may only have one or two tanks in their breweries, which makes tank scheduling critical. These tanks must be used universally for all stages of production. The challenge for micro-breweries is to make sure they have the right tank available when it is needed downstream (such as for filtered beer).
How Infor Production Scheduling can help
For breweries of all sizes, efficiently scheduling tanks creates a challenging manufacturing environment where everything from variable flow rates and floating bottlenecks to constraints around fermentation, maturation, product-dependent filtration, and filling are practically impossible to optimize while using only manual methods.
Infor Production Scheduling is a constraint-based scheduling software solution that addresses the brewing industry's unique challenge of managing the capacity of brewery tanks—and the flow of product between them. It enables brewers to automatically create the optimal production schedule in the most efficient, timely, and profitable manner to keep their operations free from bottlenecks.
Plan for success with Infor Production Scheduling:
Infor Production Scheduling can help brewers streamline their manufacturing operations. This eases the strain on complex batch production processes, so customer orders are delivered on time and creates a more efficient and profitable business.
With Infor Production Scheduling, brewers can:
How you benefit
Large-scale brewers and micro-brewers alike can manage the capacity of their brewery tanks—and the flow of product between them with Infor Production Scheduling. This scheduling solution allows for easy adjustments to brewery tanks to accommodate, prepare, plan, and schedule the right changes at the right time for proper flow of product all the way from wort preparation to bottling, kegging, and distribution. Infor Production Scheduling gives brewers the tools to automatically create the optimal production schedule for each batch of beer that they brew and manage these schedules, so each tank is used efficiently and profitably.
Customer success
Japanese Kirin Brewery produces and distributes about 800 types of beer and alcohols spanning 60 brands. With Infor Production Scheduling, they can now quickly develop independent, day-by-day plans at its headquarters, for all their factories. Also, Infor Supply Planning empowers the company to create more accurate and optimized demand and supply plans that are integrated with the seasonal demand changes of each product. This puts the necessary resources to work to avoid missed sales from stock-outs—without having to hold large amounts of excess inventory and sacrifice product freshness.
Another leading beer brewery that’s an Infor client was able to eliminate a tank per week in one of their first factories that went live with Infor Production Scheduling. This is saving millions of dollars, which will increase enormously when rolled out globally. Other outcomes are optimized timing between brewing and bottling to minimize idle packaging lines, reduced changeovers on the packaging lines, and lower finished product inventory freeing up warehouse capacity.
Why Infor?
With Infor Production Scheduling, all sizes of brewers from large-scale global brands to micro-brewers can automatically optimize and manage their production schedules to improve the way each tank is utilized—and ultimately the way the end product tastes.