Don’t play games when it comes to making informed business decisions about your kegs or the beer inside them. When selecting the right keg tracking solution, make sure it provides you with these critical features at an affordable price:
- tracks reusable assets (kegs, pallets, tap handles)
- tracks contents in kegs (using batch data)
- maps where your product is sold
- tracks contents based on freshness
- interfaces with other brewery software
The business intelligence captured by these features is crucial for managing your keg inventory, controlling the quality of your product, informing your customers where they can find your beer and locating specific batches for special handling (for recalls, repackaging, etc.).
Help Your Consumers Find You
Is your beer hiding from your customers? The right scanning technology will help your consumers find your beer by providing a beer finder map to display on your website. This is even more critical at a time when bar and brewery taproom capacities are severely limited. Drive-up pint pours and crowler/growler fills have become craft beer lovers’ mid-pandemic norm.
In spite of the pandemic, people are traveling again. By providing this information on your website, you are giving both the established loyal fans and potential new customers a great way to find your product; whether they are in their own neighborhood or out of town. It can take less time to showcase a beer map on your website than it does to pour a pint of beer.
Monitor Beer Freshness for Quality Control
It can be frustrating and extremely difficult for brewers to monitor product freshness if they don’t have visibility once beer leaves the brewery. Find a tracking solution that not only focuses on getting your assets back, but also provides freshness reporting based on batch and brand. How does this help? By giving the brewer product visibility as it approaches the “out of code” date.
Integrate Tracking with Production Software
The downstream effect of the COVID-19 quarantine has put intense pressure on brewers, forcing them to seek efficiency. Investing in technology that can work with other applications is one way. A perfect example of this is when brewery production software (BPS) interfaces with robust tracking technology, multiplying the power of both solutions.
Once you make the decision to abandon the practice of managing your brewery with sticky notes and spreadsheets, it is time to adopt the right BPS for your brewery. When evaluating which solution to purchase, consider these questions:
- Who developed this technology? Was it created by brewers and for brewers?
- Does this technology make managing my brewery easier?
- Does this technology help me make better business decisions?
- Does this technology integrate with an intelligent tracking solution to manage keg assets once they leave my brewery?
- Does it manage my recipes and raw ingredient inventory?
- Does it enable me to schedule my brewing production equipment efficiently?
- Does it provide brew/batch logs and reporting?
- Will it save me hours of work when preparing TTB tax reports?
Hillebrand’s KegID tracking solution can deliver all of the features outlined above and more. KegID will give you data/visibility to your keg inventory, product freshness, and marketplace availability. The Hillebrand team collaborated with the team at Fermentable to build a seamless integration between their BPS and KegID.
Our Keg Pros are standing by to help you find the right tools to help manage your brewery and assets so that you can spend more time creating great beer! Contact us today.