As a 100% employee owned business, New Belgium Brewing Company brews craft style beer and beverages, headquartered in Fort Collins, Colorado. New Belgium is the fourth largest craft brewery and in 2014 brewed 945,000 barrels of beer.
IT Business Analyst Jess Askey, and Business Systems Analyst, Melisse Merrell, describes what problems the business was experiencing and how they were fixed...
Prior to 2014, New Belgium Brewing was managing most trade revenue management activity through spreadsheets. The company sought a replacement solution that would enhance their business operations by giving them more visibility of promotions and discounts as well as automated trade agreements.
New Belgium used Excel spreadsheets for discount tracking and had to rely on manual updates to the spreadsheet and biweekly email updates to their sales team. This made it difficult to accurately estimate the monthly liability around their promotional discounts and manage cash flow associated with invoices. With a new facility opening in 2015, the brewery also needed a solution that was not overly complex to make user adoption easier across the company.
New Belgium decided to go with a combination of an ERP system and the Flintfox Trade Revenue Management solution to manage their trade spend more effectively and enhance relationships with their customers. The Flintfox solution allows them to apply rule-based pricing configuration that supports volume-based and percentage discounting, eliminating the need to track discounts through the use of spreadsheets and bi-weekly updates emailed to their sales teams.
New Belgium discovered that the revenue management solution could be used not just at the customer item level, but also at the site item level to help with the forecasting of production at their new facility in Asheville, North Carolina. They are able to plan what item combinations are going to be made in Colorado and what will be made in North Carolina before the new brewery has even been completed. New Belgium is able to efficiently track their monthly liabilities through bulk price requests that can be used to retrieve the price for multiple combinations of customers or products and transaction in one batch.
This allows the business to manage its cash flow around invoices far more effectively as estimates are a lot more accurate. This is an essential feature as the company has relied on Excel spreadsheets in the past to pull pricing for orders and products, which was time consuming and inefficient.
Flintfox Trade Revenue Management software has simplified the way New Belgium Brewery conducts its sales and operations.
New Belgium Brewing now has the ability to:
Jess Askey
IT Business Analyst, New Belgium Brewing Co.
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