overview
Founded by six friends in 2016, Eureka Heights Brewing Company set out to provide customers throughout the greater Houston area with high-quality, well-brewed beer. By 2018, the team signed with a local beverage distributor and started canning their craft beer — shifting their business to be 60/40 with the majority of it being canning and the rest made up of draft sales. Over the years, Eureka Heights Brewing Company has expanded to have six full-time brands on the shelves and signed with an additional distributor to extend their reach in the Houston market. Along with distribution, they also have a taproom available onsite, as well as a drive-thru.
challenge
As a craft beverage business, you need to be able to manage your inventory and production for optimal visibility across the entire team. Eureka Heights Brewing Company found themselves utilizing Google forms and manual spreadsheets to monitor their inventory, which led to inaccurate inventory counts. As a result, the team had to scramble to find the necessary supplies or pay for expedited shipping to avoid production delays that could jeopardize future sales for the business. This time-consuming and ineffective inventory process made it clear to the team that they needed a turnkey solution that would allow them to accurately and effectively monitor and report on inventory as they expand their reach across Houston.
results
When Eureka Heights Brewing Company was introduced to Ekos at the Craft Brewers Conference in 2016, they immediately recognized how Ekos aligned with their goals of managing and tracking production and inventory more accurately. Since utilizing Ekos, the team has been able to cut costs on packaging materials by monitoring purchase history reports and seeing where they’ve been able to get the lowest costs on supplies, which has impacted decisions on who to purchase from moving forward. As a result, they’ve seen a 5-10% increase in margins.
Ekos has also helped decrease the amount of time spent on data input and reporting. Instead of relying on a manual spreadsheet that often led to discrepancies in actual inventory and reported inventory, Ekos saves the team at Eureka three to four hours a week while also making inventory counts more accurate. Using Ekos, Eureka Heights Brewing Company has gained control of its inventory and found ways to save time in other areas of the business as well. “We rely on Ekos for the Brewery operations management of the production, inventory and invoicing side of the business. As far as value goes, it’s really high. I don’t see us not using it,” said Robert Eichenlaub, co-founder. “The more we’ve grown, the use and value of Ekos has gone up.”
While Eureka Heights Brewing Company began utilizing Ekos to better track inventory and production, it also experienced improvements in the efficiency of compliance reporting. “It would be extremely difficult to produce our state and federal compliance reports without using Ekos reporting. Having all of the production information data in one place and the ability to create custom reports has enabled us to significantly streamline the compliance reporting process,” said Robert. Ekos has enabled the team to reduce the time it takes to complete monthly state taxes from a full day to a few hours, and reduce quarterly taxes from a few days down to a single day.
Take a tour to see how Ekos can help your business just like Eureka Heights Brewing Company.
