This article was updated March 19, 2021.

As your brewery-based business grows, it’s important to have access to data in real time across multiple departments and locations to help manage your business.

Rather than compile multiple systems together, you can use an integrated software solution to help connect these dots. Powered by NetSuite, our proprietary enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, called Barrel ERP, allows you to manage your brewery’s business by helping to leverage meaningful real-time data across all processes, areas, departments, and locations.

Here are seven of the most commonly asked questions about Barrel ERP.

1. How can Barrel ERP help brewers navigate business disruption?

As tasting rooms closed and distribution channels were disrupted, successful breweries quickly pivoted their business models—making it clear how important it is for breweries to stay nimble and better leverage technology when managing their business. Specifically, access to data across departments and locations can increase efficiencies, even as market conditions fluctuate, and help management base their decisions on facts instead of feelings.

To stay competitive during this time and potentially capitalize on new opportunities, breweries will need to unify their product development, supply chains, manufacturing processes, and distribution networks. If they don’t, they could risk getting lost in the industry’s increasingly competitive markets.

The key features of Barrel ERP can enable a business to understand its bottom line and how the business makes money. This is integral to the brewery’s success. Barrel ERP is industry specific, cloud based, and mobile ready. It can provide real-time insight into a brewery’s operations—supplying customized, financial reports on sales, production, inventory, and cost of goods sold (COGS). It can also help breweries decrease operating costs by revealing financial metrics, accurate net-operating profits, and production capacity and efficiency.

By increasing visibility and automating processes, breweries can often decrease daily costs, increase control, and better manage the business. This, along with dynamic revenue analysis, can help them make better-informed business decisions—and these decisions can lead to consistent gains over time. 

2. What are Barrel ERP’s key features and benefits?

With Barrel ERP, every aspect of a brewery’s core business can be more easily automated and managed.

Key features include:

• Consolidation. A single source of truth that provides one set of consolidated data for sales, production, packaging, distribution, inventory, and more
• Automation. Automated critical processes and controls, which can decrease costs and increase business efficiencies
• Advanced reporting capabilities. Easy-to-use and customizable reporting capabilities that provide visibility into the metrics important to you and your business, based on your role within the company
• Customization and scalability. Flexibility to meet business needs through customizations that work with your unique requirements and a solution that easily scales with your business as it grows and gains complexity
• Cost effectiveness. A low cost of ownership through leveraging a cloud-based solution with minimal need for IT resources
• Integration. Unify accounting and production processes and automate the information exchange from, to, and between each department
• Real-time visibility. A connected business management suite from end-to-end that provides real-time insight into production costs, inventory, and more

3. What areas of my business can Barrel ERP help me better understand?

The goal is to automate processes to help decrease your daily costs and increase control to better manage the business and gain visibility so you can make better decisions for your business.

The benefit to Barrel ERP is having a single system to achieve the automation you need to better run your business. It’s also a cloud-based, mobile-ready solution that works how you work and allows all of the process owners in your business to access relevant data that’s needed to better perform their jobs in real time.  

Barrel ERP provides deep functionality in the following areas:

4. What are the key differences between Barrel ERP and other ERPs?

Barrel ERP is built into NetSuite and made just for craft breweries to meet the current and future needs of a growing business and provide the specific functionality that makes a brewery-based business unique.

Because NetSuite is exclusively cloud-based, there’s no need for servers or IT support. The vendor manages this for you and provides critical software support.

Utilizing NetSuite, Barrel ERP can be agile and easily accessed. With a web browser and log-in credentials, you can access the software from any device, which gives you flexibility to work remotely without having to wait for updates. It also requires fewer IT resources, has lower costs to own and maintain, and allows you to easily configure the product to meet your needs.

5. How long is the implementation process? And who will provide service support?

The implementation process generally takes 60–120 days depending on two factors:

• Your business size and complexity
• Availability of your team to make decisions and provide data to use in the Barrel ERP solution

A Moss Adams implementation team is established to collaboratively help you solve key business challenges and gain the most from your investment. They’ll be available to provide support as necessary and can work with NetSuite on your behalf if a scenario requires additional support to resolve any software issues.

6. Is my business information secure and confidential in Barrel ERP?

Barrel ERP leverages NetSuite to provide an enterprise-wide level of world-class security protection for both the application and your data. Other security measures include role-based access, 256-bit TLS encryption, single-sign on, multifactor authentication, and more.

To provide you extra confidence and peace of mind, NetSuite can apply additional layers of security, such as application-only access and access restricted to only certain IP addresses.

7. Can Barrel ERP scale as my business grows?

Yes. Brewery-based businesses currently using Barrel ERP cover a broad spectrum in size, complexity, and business models. NetSuite doesn’t require programing to add a custom field, record, or custom report. Barrel ERP can be modified to meet your business needs today and tomorrow.

For over 20 years, NetSuite has worked with businesses that are actively growing and adapting to scale. More broadly, it has nearly 20,000 customers of varying sizes in 203 countries and dependent territories.

8. Does Barrel ERP work for hard seltzer or kombucha-type products?

Yes. Barrel ERP works for both hard seltzer and kombucha producers. For these businesses, Barrel ERP replaces the multiple systems that handle disparate parts of the business, including Microsoft Excel and manual processes. Barrel ERP is a complete brewery management tool that creates efficient and automated processes for day-to-day operations from the brew house to the warehouse.

We’re Here to Help

To learn more about establishing best practices and an automated solution that helps you better manage your brewery-based business, contact your Moss Adams professional.