Organising operations in a modern brewery

Key benefits Saved cost of hard wired networks Achieved flexible working environment Faster and better business decision making Got away from a constrained office environment Linked sales and production planning with live, meaningful two-way information Charles Wells, the Bedford-based and very English brewer of such famous tipples as Bombardier bitter and 400 others, has invested astutely in its IT and network infrastructure in order to facilitate managing everything better – and that’s brewing itself and distribution and the company, but also its wholesale and retail businesses. Managing director Paul Wells says the firm’s success is largely down to real time visibility. “Integration is absolutely key, all the way from the plant to the business. We need to ensure that as much of our information as possible is accurate and real time so that everyone is on the same page and we can all make good business decisions faster. So, for example, we want sales figures from the previous day available now, not at month end. And if sales people have information, we want that data as fast as possible here for action.” How’s it achieved that? First the basics: Charles Wells has been a Geac System 21 ERP and iSeries house since 1990 when the system was implemented under the then ‘Project 2000’ initiative. Modules implemented include sales order processing, financials, manufacturing, inventory management and distribution. Meanwhile at the plant level, it’s run from a central control room by Siemens’ PCS 7 process management system, originally implemented as Tistar from Texas Instruments, at the time billed as the best of both worlds between discrete manufacturing PLC (programmable controller) and process industry DCS (distributed control system) technologies. There are layers of logical management and control. The huge canning, bottling and packaging hall, for example, relies on automation from the machine OEMs; each has its own terminal for programming, tuning, diagnostics and operator interface, with changeovers for different products, bottle and packaging types, maintenance and so on scheduled from ERP. All conventional stuff, although the integrated business intelligence, for example, is clever – providing real production costs, not standard packaging and brewing overheads, for each brew so that the entire company, including business development, knows the real world in real time, with real KPIs. “It’s about good management,” says Wells, “but there are real financial and smart working implications as well, particularly for a company of our size. Our culture is very much one of autonomy and individual decision-making, so we need absolute clarity of information to enable our managers to manage.” Supporting all that is the IT and network infrastructure, with Lotus Notes running on a separate AS/400 plus a test machine for redundancy. There are also three Netfinity boxes running Citrix thin client to the desktops, as well as web access, firewall, security, mail sweeper, automated URL protection and the rest. Lotus Notes effectively wraps around the ERP, providing email, but also CRM), field sales management and shortly also HR. IT manager David Geliher went for Citrix in 2000. “We were going to have to replace a lot of PCs, so we chose Citrix and thin client instead and now use IBM NetStations and Fujitsu laptops.” Connection, however, is a mix of token ring dating from the early ‘90s, with a little CAT5 and Ethernet; the rest is wireless. Geliher makes the point that with the business wanting more hot-desking and mobile working, the firm effectively leapfrogged CAT5 technology and went straight for a wireless LAN from Madge Networks. It was a good choice. Says Geliher: “We’ve got desktop switching at 16Mbits. Our new Eagle Centre [training and restaurant] is almost totally wireless. That saved us a lot of money… Wireless networks today are a no-brainer. It’s meant we’ve been able to get away from the constrained office environment. We have frequent moves of people and we’re very mobile; we want our people to be able to sit at a table with their laptops, mobile phones and a cup of coffee and be productive.” And the same thought processes apply to Charles Wells’ delivery fleet. “We’re using Orange for all our mobile connections, including in the drays, which are equipped with fixed mobiles.” And there are also moves afoot to extend that thinking, where appropriate, into the production environment – with beepers and mobile phones for operators and maintenance engineers. Looking externally, it’s a picture of ADSL into the corporate network via a VPN. For roaming, however, it’s again a wireless world, with Bluetooth-enabled mobiles linking into staff laptops and HP iPAQ PDAs. “We’re essentially a single site,” explains Geliher, “but with a lot of mobile workers and with responsibility for 17 managed pubs. So wireless inside and outside, as well as ADSL, are our most useful network technologies. We use ADSL for the pubs too, providing the EPOS data and so on.”