The craft brewery industry can be rewarding yet complex. Especially in the Canadian market, it can be difficult to establish your brand and craft beverages against large-name logos in an environment where revenues are dropping. Strategic brewery management through the effective use of Canadian brewing software becomes essential.
Of course, taking that step requires forethought, planning, and follow-through in implementing new, more efficient processes. Many craft breweries don’t use any management tool at all and sometimes resort to manual pen-and-paper methods.
Others may use an industry-agnostic enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform that doesn’t account for the nuances of this complex business model. That makes choosing the right software solution a potential competitive advantage in your quest for profitability, high quality, and sustainable success.
The journey of optimizing your brewery begins with understanding which features matter most. That means focusing on the brewery-specific tools and capabilities provided by Ekos, not to mention features that account for the nuances of the Canadian brewing market.
Establishing a Need for Canadian Brewing Software
Along with its complexity, the brewing industry is becoming more competitive. There are now more than 1,200 breweries in Canada, most of which are small craft brewers just looking to share their passion for making beverages with local and loyal customers.
At the same time, increasing regulations have made effective brewery management more important than ever. From traceability to excise duty payments, strictly regulated information on packaging, and more, maintaining compliance means following these rules even while keeping focus on brewing great beer.
This is where Ekos can make a significant impact with its Canadian brewing software. With effective inventory management, batch tracing, recipe recordkeeping, and reporting features that are both custom and automated, it can help any business owner in the field manage and streamline these government regulations. Let’s explore each of these core features in more detail.
Benefit #1. Inventory Management to Accommodate Traceability Requirements
Traceability has been a buzzword among Canadian brewers for a few years now, and for good reason. Regulations put in place in mid-2020 now require craft beverage companies to track and record the movement of their products both forward and backward in the supply chain, from raw materials all the way to the distribution of finished brews.
Accomplishing that feat requires impeccable recordkeeping, which Ekos provides. Our Canadian brewing software, optimized to accommodate these requirements, can go a long way toward achieving that goal.
Related: Safe Food for Canadians Regulations: What Craft Alcohol Companies in Canada Need to Know
It all begins with automated inventory management. With a brewery-focused platform, you can get a real-time overview of all your current inventory, including where it came from. That encompasses raw goods, packaging materials, and depleted kegs, cans, and bottles.
Of course, the benefits go beyond traceability requirements. You’re also able to more accurately forecast your demand and place orders accordingly. To avoid shortages and stockouts, you can even reorder automatically as soon as you hit your specified threshold. Ekos can streamline your entire process, ultimately helping you run your brewery more smoothly.
Benefit #2. Keeping Track of Your Produced Lots in Real Time
Inventory management focuses on the different pieces before and after production, but the process of getting from one to the other is just as important. That’s where lot tracking enters the equation.
Ekos’s Canadian brewing software enables you to track and record every element of your operations. Beer producers can track their individual batch ingredients, transfers, transitions, and finished goods. You can follow each lot all the way through to the delivery to your customers, ensuring that every lot you produce is high quality and produced on schedule.
This is a level of nuance that only dedicated brewing software can accomplish. The resulting data becomes essential for any Canadian craft brewer looking to keep track of their production, helping not just with quality control but also with forecasting to avoid any kinks in the operational chain.
Benefit #3. Cloud-Based Capabilities to Make Brewery Management Location Agnostic
At any given moment, your team is unlikely to be in the same spot. Even if they are, you probably don’t have a single computer everyone uses to track, enter, and report on production information. That’s what makes the cloud-based nature of Ekos’s Canadian brewing software such a key advantage for any craft beverage company.
With cloud-based software, everyone on the team involved in managing your operations can access the same information. Entries sync dynamically, ensuring everyone benefits from real-time access. Because the software can become the single source of truth for all parts of the brewery, there’s less risk of error even when team members in multiple locations or departments access relevant information.
Benefit #4. Recordkeeping for Custom Recipes—and More
Traceability requirements also extend to being able to report on the recipes you use in production. Of course, no two recipes are ever the same, making it crucial to have the ability to keep your custom recipes in the right spot. The central recordkeeping system Ekos provides allows you to keep your recipes consistent no matter how unique they are.
The same tool can also go further. Through recipe templates, you can iterate and innovate off your existing brews to discover new possibilities. You don’t have to rebuild each recipe from scratch but can create seasonal favorites and tweak existing varieties more efficiently to integrate into your digitally built workflows.
Of course, our recordkeeping capabilities go beyond recipes as well. From accounting to QA data and more, hosting all of your information in a central location—which is cloud based, no less—keeps all of your important data in place for reporting and compliance requirements from Canadian authorities.
Benefit #5. Custom Reporting Features for Current and Future Regulatory Needs
Keeping all relevant information in a single spot is one thing. Being able to report on that information matters just as much, if not more. After all, what good is information if it’s difficult to pull when needed?
Fortunately, this is another key benefit of dedicated Canadian brewing software. With Ekos, you can build custom reports for any information in the system, enabling you to keep up with current compliance requirements and easily adjust for potential future changes.
Better yet, any reports can easily be automated to run on certain dates and times, always pulling real-time information for maximum accuracy. That makes regular reporting, such as the monthly Excise Duty report required by the Canada Revenue Agency, much more streamlined, potentially saving hours every month.
Benefit #6. Advanced Integrations to Manage Your Sales and Accounting
Even the most comprehensive Canadian brewing software can’t cover every aspect of your business. For example, you’ll likely still need to use dedicated accounting software or a platform that manages sales through your various points of purchase. Here, integrations become key to success.
Related: Ekos Lot Tracking Update Gives a New Level of Visibility to Craft Producers
Through Ekos, you no longer have to worry about running multiple isolated systems that don’t communicate with each other. Instead, advanced integrations with tools like QuickBooks, Shopify, Square, and more help bring your various systems together.
Ultimately, building a single source of truth for your brewery is only possible if you can accomplish these integrations at every level of your business. By moving to Ekos, you can begin to build that comprehensive system to run all parts of your brewery, grounded on the same data for maximum accuracy and predictability.
Benefit #7. An Established Footprint in the Canadian Brewery Market
Finally, and especially if you are moving to Canadian brewing software for the first time, the key to effective management is adopting a solution that already understands and can accommodate the unique needs of the country’s market and industry. Fortunately, this is a key area where Ekos can deliver as well.
We are proud to partner with more than 150 companies in the Canadian market alone. That’s in addition to breweries across six continents. Every day, we add to our unique combination of in-depth industry expertise and local specifics that allow us to build software specifically designed for Canadian breweries.
And we’re not done. Set in the near future, our new feature will support GST tax on all purchases, adding another automation that simplifies otherwise manual processes and further establishes Ekos as a premier option in Canadian brewery management.
Build Your Canadian Brewing Operations With Ekos
It’s time to take your brewery management to the next level. Features like advanced inventory management, lot tracking, reporting, and integrations enable you to streamline your operations while establishing the baseline you need to remain in compliance with Canadian regulations.
At Ekos, we pride ourselves in our dedication to the craft beverage industry, with advanced features designed to be simple and easy to implement for any size operation. Ready to get started? See for yourself how Ekos can help your brewery succeed by booking a demo today.
