The main reason we started looking out to
the East Coast was trying to get our beer as fresh as we could to the market.
Obviously it made a lot more sense to make the beer out here in Mills River in North Carolina.
However, the excitement of trying to
build a new brewery and run a business
in two locations became quite
challenging for a family-run business.
The biggest concern that you have in any
business is knowing what your assets are.
The unique thing about kegs is the brewing industry for so many years just kept filling them, shipping them out,
and not really knowing how many they were getting back - what they were getting back.
They're a huge asset. They don't do any good sitting around empty.
We need to get them back and filled, and get them back to the consumers.
Before KegID, we literally
had to go out and count kegs.
It was an all-manual function.
We didn't have any good data to know how many were out there in the industry,
how many were coming back.
We hoped we had enough kegs to fill and make the orders.
We're now pushing over a million barrels of beer out of here.
There is no way we could track all these kegs without having the visibility that SLG provides.
The process actually starts at the distributor when Kegspediter picks those kegs up.
The KegID aspect - that's more of the management of the actual asset, down to the serial number.
Those two work together hand-in-hand.
Especially in any food product, traceability is not only becoming more and more the law,
but it's just good management practice.
Beer is an agricultural product that comes from raw materials.
You need to know what you're putting that product in, and you need to know where that product is.
So we have two forms of scans we use at Sierra Nevada Brewery.
One is a handheld. A nice thing about that: it's mobile.
We can use that for inventory control if we have to go double check our inventory as we receive kegs back in.
The other one is a fixed scanner - actually on our line going into the racker, prior to being filled.
Once the keg's filled, it goes back out another line where
another fix scanner reads it and tells
us exactly what product's put in that keg.
The nice thing about it is when you make intelligent decisions based on information that you have.
We do that off our computers. We can do it off our iPhones.
Once we know where the kegs are,
and we can start tracking them, then we
go to Kegspediter and we actually
facilitate getting to the right location.
So as Sierra Nevada and the craft
industry grows, it becomes more and more
important that we know where these
assets are and that we have good partnerships.
Our relationship with SLG
has been for over 20 years.
It has been a great partnership.
Cheers.
