Deschutes Improves Forecasting for New Products and Changing Consumer Preferences
COMPANY: Deschutes Brewery
WEBSITE: www.DeschutesBrewery.com
INDUSTRY: Beverages, Wine & Spirits
COMPANY TYPE: Privately Held
JOHN GALT SOLUTION: Atlas Planning Platform
Results
- Better forecasting for changing consumer preferences
- Reduction of stock-outs and inventory levels
- Improved on-time deliveries and customer satisfaction
Company
Deschutes Brewery is one of the largest craft breweries in the country located in Bend, Oregon. Two of its most famous products include Black Butte Porter and Mirror Pond Pale Ale. The brewery also produces a number of seasonal craft beers. Its mission is to create products that bring people together to spend meaningful time with one another. Deschutes ships its products both domestically and internationally.
Challenge
Consumer preferences in the beer industry often vacillate and change quickly. Craft beer drinkers especially love to seek out new flavors and styles. This creates unique challenges for forecasting sales of newly released beers. If consumers don’t take to the product, the brewery gets stuck carrying inventory. If consumers like the product and buy more than forecasted, they will simply buy another product from a competitor in the event of a stock-out.
Deschutes Brewery struggled with both stock-outs and overstocking finished goods with their distributors. This challenge affected the relationship with distributers and retailers who strive to maximize product turnover, making it harder for the sales team to grow share-of-shelf.
Solution
Deschutes Brewery implemented John Galt Solutions’ Atlas Planning Platform to help address their forecasting challenges. The demand management engine lets the planning team forecast new product introductions by selecting comparable products by any attribute, such as product family, target audience, region, and more. The planning portal allows the sales team to easily contribute to the planning process by entering their forecasts and aggregating all the data in one place. Atlas allows for better forecasting as well as improved tracking of important performance indicators such as forecast accuracy, fill rate and inventory levels.
Benefit
Partnering with John Galt Solutions makes it easier for Deschutes to get new product forecasting right, minimizing the number of stock-outs and limiting excess inventory. The company now effortlessly creates new product forecasts based on similar products using a wide variety of attributes such as product family, beer type, target audience, region, and more. In addition, the ability to easily access the forecasting tool in the cloud from anywhere in the world helps the company keep their forecasts current, even when their sales team is on the go. All these improvements allow Deschutes to better service both their distributors and end customers.
“We are particularly excited about the planning portal and the ability for the sales team to enter their forecast directly and aggregate all the information in one place.”
Production Planning Manager
