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Wormtown Brewery opened in 2010 in the back of an ice cream stand in Worcester, MA and has grown to be a 30,000 bbl production brewery with two taprooms in the Boston area and a 7 bbl “test kitchen” at one of their locations. They sell their beers in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Connecticut, and Vermont.

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Prior to using Ekos, Wormtown had been using Orchestrated Beer (OBeer), but they found that the software was too complicated. “It was just a pain from all levels. Universally people were just frustrated with it,” said Kary Shumway, CFO of Wormtown Brewery. The Wormtown team was unable to access the information they needed to properly run their business because the reporting was too difficult to manage. Furthermore, the technical support they were getting with OBeer wasn’t sufficient for their needs.

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After taking their time to vet Ekos, the Wormtown Brewery team finally decided to switch to Ekos in May of 2019. Since then, things have been running much smoother. “I’ve not found in my career a software that for the most part people aren’t complaining about. I know that’s not a great marketing piece, but it’s true. Every other software I worked with, you’d hear almost daily complaints. With Ekos, you just don’t hear those complaints, and that’s pretty important.” Kary also feels that the support he gets with Ekos is much better because the Ekos team always answers the phone and can help answer any questions his staff has.

Perhaps most important, having better access to data with Ekos has helped Wormtown find opportunities to boost their bottom line. “I can access data that’s going to allow us to improve our financial results. This is a tool that we can use to access the data of our business so that we can do the analysis and determine where we might have opportunities to do better.”