Today I want to pause and share how magical the keg is. I’m not talking about the way it can keep beer isolated from light and air. I’m not talking about how this translates into a fresher beer longer. I’m not talking about how it really is the ultimate in sustainable container for the food and beverage industry. I’m talking about how critical it is as a business performance indicator.
Do you know how many kegs you currently have available onsite? Do you know how many and which ones are clean and can be filled? Are you concerned that you might be wasting money by having to manage more kegs than you need? Is your keg float out of control and unmanageable? Do you know how long it takes for your kegs to go through their full usage cycle? Do you want a competitive advantage? Do you want to squeeze out as much usage for each keg you have in your fleet so you can minimize the amount of kegs you need to purchase in order to expand your operations?
I’ve looked at ERP’s out there and if they can do any of those things they either don’t do them well or require such complex inflexible workflows that the breweries rarely take advantage of them. This is why we created KegMetrics.
Peter Drucker, who “is considered the single most important thought leader in the world of management” (quoted from Wikipedia), said “What gets measured gets improved.” This is what KegMetrics does for breweries. We improve your business operations through the biggest unit your brewery outputs–the keg.
How do we do that? KegMetrics measures and tracks all the kegs in your fleet and provides analysis of their individual and aggregate status so you can see areas of waste in your production cycle. The tracking of kegs also surfaces the status of your fleet in general so you know what you have and how much available capacity you have. Over time it’s easy to predict trends.
The keg is the heartbeat of the brewing industry.
The keg tells us how much, who, where and the rhythm of your business as well as the industry. Statistics of the keg can tell us who are good customers and who are not so good customers. The keg can tell us the success and predicted ROI of tasting events. It can also inform us on how well run a particular tasting event is. Statistics on the keg can inform your decisions on which distributors are better to work with than others. By measuring the keg cycles you can even estimate your potential growth capacity as an organization.
Yes, packaged goods are units of sale that can inform the industry and the individual brewery as well, but not like the keg can. Many breweries believe that packaged goods are where the growth of the industry is going to be and they may be right. This just increases the importance of the keg. Why? Just like your body can grow and you still need to measure your heart rate at critical times, the same is true for the keg. This is because the keg is the heartbeat of the business.
The keg is a cyclical unit. It has a lifecycle that has a beginning and an end. This lifecycle includes being returned back to the brewery for re-use and starting again. There’s no rewind in business. You can’t go back in time and have a do over. There is a replay though, and if you don’t learn from the events in the past you are bound to re-live the mistakes and the experiences in the future. This will happen until you finally do learn from your mistakes. There is no other, better, single unit you can use to measure the operational effectiveness and efficiency of your brewery than the keg.
If you’re not measuring the flow of your kegs through your operations than you are denying yourself and your business incredible knowledge, power and control over your success. If you’re not looking at the cycles of your kegs, then you are creating unnecessary frustration and simply wasting money. Our research shows this lack of action will translate into a cost of $5.70 per keg per month or $20,520 a year for a 300 keg brewery. That’s a tax on your production that just doesn’t make sense to incur.
The kegs are going to move through the lifecycle anyways and to improve your net income you need to do more than to just sell more beer. You need to increase your margins on the beer you do sell. You can’t do that if you don’t take action.
There are a few options you can do to take action. You can increase your margins by increasing your price per unit. With the increased competition and amount of breweries in the country that will possibly hurt sales. You can reduce your production costs by buying cheaper ingredients or using less of them. That will likely decrease your overall brand quality and you may experience sales loss.
Thankfully, there’s another option to solving this problem. You can go to KegMetrics.com and click the “Get Started Today” button on the main page. You’ll be contacted to choose the plan that is right for your organization and you’ll be surprised at how cost effective it is. KegMetrics comes with a 100% money back guarantee so there’s really no risk.
The best part is you don’t have to change your work flow and you don’t have to buy expensive hardware to use KegMetrics. KegMetrics is keg Management and tracking software. You can say goodbye to the frustration and wasted days of struggling to know who has your kegs and you can say hello to doing what you love, brewing beer. KegMetrics manages your cooperage including your keg float for you.
With KegMetrics you can:
- Quickly and Easily know what kegs are out and with who.
- Automatically email reports to customers who have had YOUR kegs out longer than you would like and BCC your collections or sales team.
- Be prepared for filling your kegs without having to make last minute calls to rent additional kegs.
- Trigger your sales team to re-visit a customer
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Trigger your collections team/partners to pick up empty kegs
Don’t waste any more money. Take back control of your operations. Sign up to use KegMetrics today. Your brewery can now harness the magic of the keg to improve operations and actually get your cost per unit down. This means more profit for selling the same amount of beer you do now. The magic of the keg can also indicate the time to sell which means you’ll sell more beer. Lastly with increased operational efficiency your brewery will be able to expand cheaper than otherwise. Again this will translate to more sales.
The magic of the keg is the power that it provides for clarity and brewery success. Are you harnessing the magic of the keg today?
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