Navigating the Future of Brewery Management with Innovative Technology

Breweries all over the United States have one common goal: driving profit. In an economic environment where competition is at an all-time high and costs are steadily rising, brewery owners must prioritize profitability.

Bryan Williams opened Gizmo Brew Works 10 years ago. When starting his business, he knew that running it using spreadsheets wouldn’t scale and ultimately would not help him drive profit. He searched for a platform to help him run a better business during the North Carolina Brewers Conference. There, he was introduced to a brewery management solution.

At the time, no other solution could track your production and inventory in one place. It was something that Williams felt he needed to have at Gizmo Brew Works, and after receiving a good deal, he signed the contract.

Williams became an early adopter of that software and initially had high hopes, believing the solution would help grow his business and set him up for success. In the summer of 2022, that provider raised their rates significantly. Williams decided it was time to start his due diligence process and see what else was on the market.

“There has to be a better platform to run my business.”

To ensure he made the best choice for his next business platform, Williams ran his own miniature RFP-and-scoring model to rate all of the solutions he was evaluating. He found eight companies that piqued his interest. His scoring was simple: Rate the eight companies based on their capabilities for production, sales, inventory, reporting, and support.

After conducting each demo, Williams found that no other solution currently available on the market enabled breweries to understand the overall health of their business and drive better decision-making. However, after hearing about a newcomer in the craft beverage industry, he discovered Ohanafy—a brewery management software that zeroes in on increasing profitability, managing costs, and creating new levels of efficiency through automation and analytics.

“I was looking for the best platform to support my business over the next 10 years,” Williams says. “When I asked myself who I could grow with, the answer was clear: Ohanafy.”

Williams scheduled a meeting with the Ohanafy team to learn more about the platform. During the demo, he was surprised to learn that Ohanafy had only been live for four months. He was impressed by Ohanafy's reporting features, which he felt were superior to his previous providers’ reporting.

But that’s not all that impressed him. The fact that Ohanafy is built on the Salesforce platform was the “icing on the cake,” Williams says, since it enables Ohanafy “to iterate so much quicker than other providers because they built the brick and mortar, so they were stuck with what they had. And for them to make changes, it took a lot more work, which means they developed a lot slower.” Williams was happy to hear that, for the first time, he was limited only by his imagination. Leveraging the world’s No. 1 platform, he not only had the reports provided out-of-the-box, but he was able to create custom reports based on what mattered most to him.

For the first time in a long time, Williams had faith that this new solution could be a game-changer for his business and help him make better business decisions. In early 2022, Williams decided to switch and started migrating his data to Ohanafy.

“For the first time, I’m able to mold the technology around my business and our process, instead of the other way around.”

With 10 years of historical data being migrated, one of the biggest fears Williams and his team had was losing all of that data. Looking back, Williams says that his biggest challenge “was getting over that mental threshold of what will happen to my data. Most of the companies I looked at said we cannot bring that data into our platform. With Ohanafy, they said, ‘Yes, we can do that.’”

While preparing to make the switch, Williams assumed the process would be long and painful. But the transition to Ohanafy was simple and quick. The Ohanafy team did all the heavy lifting and ensured he would have everything he needed to see on Day One. Throughout the implementation phase, he received training and ongoing support that continued once he went live on the platform.

The implementation was a breeze, and with Ohanafy’s hands-on training and support, any time Williams or one of his team members had a question, they were one quick phone call or text message away.

“If you’re scared about leaping from a platform that is more mature but has grown stale, don’t hesitate,” Williams says. “The Ohanafy team is amazing. They’ve got a huge vision, and for me, I cannot wait for it to revolutionize our industry, especially at a time when it’s harder and harder to open and operate a brewery than it ever has been in the past 10 years.”

“For the first time, I can now easily see which beers we make the most money with and which we should discuss raising prices on or discontinuing.”

A hallmark for any business is to using data to make better business decisions that drive growth. “There’s so much going on in my business, and as the manager, I need to know what’s happening in my business,” Williams says. “Being able to transact the brewing and sales is one thing, but being able to make decisions is the most important thing.”

That’s where Ohanafy’s dashboards and reports come into play. Not only were their basic reports created by the Ohanafy team, but Williams also could create his reports to track what mattered most, displaying it in a way that made sense for his business operations. A vital feature of these functions is the ability for sales, inventory, and production to speak to each other in a way they’ve never been able to before.

“With Ohanafy, I can now look across my entire business and understand the decisions that we’re making that impact our profitability, costs, margins, and yield by different product lines and packaging types,” Williams says. “For the first time, I can now easily see which beers we make the most money with and which we should discuss raising prices on or discontinuing.” This functionality has immeasurable potential and high value for brewery owners looking to compete in the craft beverage industry.

“That vision impresses me. Their ability to quickly develop and deliver new innovative functionality is unmatched.”

Williams and his team at Gizmo Brew Works have been able to track and view business insights to make better business decisions. Ultimately, his team can now drive revenue using data from production, inventory, sales, and so much more. Williams says he has high hopes for the future of the craft beverage industry now that Ohanafy has entered the market. “They’re able to develop and iterate on our feedback so quickly that I really didn’t sign up for the product today,” he says. “But the vision and how fast they’re able to develop impresses me. Whereas where I came from, development was so slow, I was lucky to get one feature a year that improved my business, and it just had grown stale and wasn’t innovating anymore.”

The brewery management landscape is constantly evolving, and breweries must stay on top of the latest tools and technologies to remain competitive. With a commitment to providing the best customer service and continuously developing and delivering innovations at record speed, they’re quickly becoming the go-to platform for breweries nationwide. Ohanafy offers a comprehensive solution on the world’s No. 1 platform to help you run your business more effectively and drive profitability—whether you’re a small independent brewery or a large multinational corporation.

Cheers to Bryan Williams and his team at Gizmo Brew Works. Breweries are switching to Ohanafy; talk to our team to learn why.