Uniting Data for Carlton & United Breweries
Looking at Beer Management ‘In the Round’

Carlton & United Breweries (CUB) has been around since the 19th century, and is one of Australia’s favourite brewers. It is also the Australian entity of ABInBev, the largest brewery group in the world. They were aware of a need to drive new efficiencies in the way the business operated, and needed a strategic partner to help them identify and implement more streamlined and efficient practices.

https://www.ab-inbev.com/

Our Understanding

Our prior experience told us that every manufacturing and distribution operation, such as CUB, needs careful management in order to drive efficiencies. So we knew from the outset that we had three clear objectives. The first of these was to feed the decision-making processes of a Transformation team. We also had to enable the Supply Chain leadership team to make fact-based decisions on operating models and route-to-market; and finally, we needed to facilitate better engagement between Supply Chain Management and Finance & Commercial, to maximise collective benefits.

Our Approach

We first met with CUB for a week-long, on-site design workshop. Our team led the workshop, teasing out all the business requirements. By the end of the week, a full scope document had been detailed, enabling the build process to start. The scope of this covered all components from Gross Sales through to Customer Contribution, enabling a true and holistic view of customer and product profitability.


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Measures of Success

By taking strategic direction and focus area from the business, we were able to analyse existing data along those lines and feed our findings back to the business. The immediate result of this was that logistics opportunities worth more than AU$14m were identified, representing 0.8% of net revenue, and more than 8% of existing distribution costs.

This involved new approaches to route-to-market being quantified, including the development of a simulation tool for use when negotiating delivery mechanisms with customers. Our strategy also involved quantifying new approaches to Minimum Order Quantities, as well as the working capital impact of old and slow-moving stock, by product and distribution centre.