MYOB provides greater efficiency to aid dramatic rise of unique brewery

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Published on the 10/05/2018 | Written by MYOB

AT A GLANCE

Tuatara Brewery

INDUSTRY

Manufacturing, Food and beverage

BUSINESS OBJECTIVE

Lack of depth of reporting
Slow, manual data entry and processes
Difficult to drill down into product costs
Lack of features to cater for growing business needs

SOLUTION

MYOB Advanced Business

BUSINESS BENEFITS

Live, insightful reports for greater detail into performance
Integration with distribution partner to speed up order fulfilment
20% of time saved with more effective data entry
Cloud software saves costs, improves access
Future-proofed solution to keep pace with their growing business

FOR MORE INFORMATION

MYOB//
E: biggerbusiness@myob.com
NZ: 0800 696 239
AU: 1300 555 110
https://www.myob.com/

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What started as a one-man’s passion project turned into an award-winning beer brand found all over New Zealand and overseas…

Growing a sophisticated manufacturing operation featuring numerous product lines, Tuatara required a new business system, they made the move to MYOB Advanced.

System not geared for future changes
When Annemaree Deed, Finance Manager, joined Tuatara in 2014, the business was going through big changes.

“They had used AccountRight since the beginning to manage finances and IRD requirements” she recounts. “It was great for accounting, however it was cracking at the seams due to the complexity growing business needs.”

In 2014, Tuatara Brewery was at a tipping point in its growth trajectory. Their management team grew to include marketing, sales, packaging, brewing and distribution specialists. A new Operations Manager, Jason Brown joined and wanted to bring in changes to aid the organisations performance.

Their distribution processes included many manual processes resulting in potential errors. The lack of visibility into stock was impacting sales for the Business Brewers on the road and they just wanted more information at their fingertips. In short, they just needed more real time data.

“We just didn’t have the right tools to make the improvements we needed.” Annemaree said. “Because we brew so many different types of beer, we needed to know the costs and profitability of each. We also wanted something to integrate with our logistics provider to streamline the distribution process and ensure the products got to our customers as efficiently as they could .”

“We just didn’t have the right tools to make the improvements we needed.”

An explosion of features at the right price
Early in 2015, Tuatara contacted Wellington business systems experts Walker Scott. With their guidance, they went through an exploration of several products including MYOB Advanced. They were focused on return on investment and wanted the best bang for buck. Cloud software was a must to ensure it was ‘future proof’ and available in any location. In the end they choose Advanced as it met their budget and feature criteria with room to grow.

“We had always been satisfied with the support MYOB had offered and were happy to stay within the MYOB family.” Annemaree affirmed. “For every requirement Advanced had the functionality we needed. I was surprised by the wide range of features at the price point. Going through the evaluation, I knew taking our business to the next level was attainable with this software.”

“Being a cloud product and not having to worry about the costs of hardware was a great plus. We have a lot of staff who work on the road or from home so it was important to have that flexibility.

“We have a lot of staff who work on the road or from home so it was important to have a cloud product that gave us that flexibility.”

Outcome
Advanced now delivers the tools the business needs to perform at a high level and scalability to handle future growth.

“Our beer is manufactured in two stages – raw beer and finished beer in either keg or bottle format. When you multiply that by the number of different beer flavours we produce and the regularity in which we change flavours… it’s a lot of data to track. With Advanced we felt it had the functionality to be able to track all the costs in that process and allow us to report the information we needed to various parts of the business.”

They’ve also reduced over ordering as they have more visibility into inventory on hand.

They use bill of materials functionality to do batch control for brewing to calculate gross profit margins for batches. This helps them predict the costs and profitability of potential new flavours giving management new levels of insight into what products lines in which to invest. It also provides a basis to project future raw material requirements.

Advanced has helped in their stock management. Tuatara now have visibility into stock in multiple locations, stock volumes by individual product line and at different stages in the manufacturing process.

“We can now isolate what stock we have and see what stage it is at,” says Annemaree. “Is it finished beer or in the tank? In the past this was really manual and time consuming which meant it was open to errors. Now we are more confident in the numbers we produce.”

New reporting dashboards built using Microsoft Power BI have helped their teams become high performing groups. Their Business Brewers (sales team) can now use their smart devices to access live information on sales and stock levels whilst on the go.

“The sales team get a lot of value from being able to see sales and stock levels every day,” said Annemaree. “With live data being pushed to their app, its updated hourly so it’s great for the business to also analyse trends which gives us a lot of confidence making sales and promotion decisions.”

MYOB Advanced now integrates via an Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) with their distribution partner Toll Holdings. A huge boost to operational efficiency has been achieved as new orders from all customers, big or small, are automatically shared between both systems so they know what is available at the distribution warehouse and what has been shipped and delivered.

“We can now distribute with confidence, it’s just something we don’t have to worry about,” shared Annemaree. “The order can be sent and distributed to our clients in real-time. It’s just a simpler and better way of doing things. If an order comes in we have got live information that we can act on.”

Reporting is faster and smarter. When tricky questions come up, finance can customise reports to provide the information their stakeholders need. When they need to get ‘nitty-gritty’ with analysis they can easily export information into Excel.

“Everything is just quicker to process,” says Annemaree enthusiastically. “Because information is entered in real-time, we don’t need to touch things twice. We’re now more confident in data. I think 20% of our time is saved being able to process things more effectively.”

“Everything is just quicker to process. Because information is entered in real-time, we don’t need to touch things twice.”

“I loved the clickability [sic] of Advanced. If I have a report I can now click into it, to drill down into information. I don’t have to go to a different system, it’s all there in one place.”

“We’re only using 75% of Advanced’s capabilities but its good because we know that as we grow we’ve got a system that can grow with us. Like transacting in foreign currencies, we don’t use it often but it will be a big help in the future..”

Source: This article was originally sourced from MYOB