At BrewDog, Morag Thomas helped project manage a 300hl brewery build, tender brewery equipment, implement supply and demand planning processes and much more. In this piece Thomas, now the founder of Elsie Waves, shares some of her expertise across operations, efficiency, supply chain, planning and project management.
Prior to starting Elsie Waves, I held an eclectic mix of roles in various industries ranging from quality control and technician at an optical laboratory, NPD project management in an extrusion blow moulding factory, supply chain analyst and forecast planner in the automotive world to market and forecast analyst at a global engineering business.
In amongst that I also dabbled in a bit of entrepreneurialism as I started two businesses and worked alongside my dad briefly in the events industry, which quite clearly didn’t make me a millionaire but gave me valuable experience in the wider business world.
All of this takes us up to November 2014 when I became production project manager at BrewDog, reporting directly to Martin Dickie and about to become exposed to a huge variety of activity, opportunity and fast paced madness like you wouldn’t believe.
In my time at one of the UK’s fastest growing companies, I project managed a 300hl brewery build and a 130,000ft² warehouse start up, tendered the USA brewery equipment, implemented supply and demand planning processes, recruited many amazing people, designed capacity models to fine tune production, supported improved budgeting/reporting processes, managed hop contracts and material forecasting and built a production process data system.
In addition, I was able to become Certified Cicerone, an Aroxa trained taster (taught by the amazing Bill Simpson) and have participated in four hop harvest selections in Yakima, USA.
I was also lucky enough to visit hop farms and played a tiny role in the start-up of Hop Revolution in New Zealand by providing supporting analysis to prove there was more demand for NZ hop varieties than was currently being supplied.
My experience at BrewDog was wide ranging and a time I am proud of but the current pandemic, lockdown and furlough brought about a fresh desire to spread my wings, use my experience to support other businesses and to learn more about the world outside.
I left in July 2020 and since then have set up my own consulting / project management business called Elsie Waves with the aim of working with breweries and raw material suppliers to support various operational challenges, growth missions, planning, project management etc.
When thinking about what my next career move would be there was one constant that I couldn’t let go of and that was that I wanted to remain connected to beer in some way.
Being part of a craft that outputs delicious products is extremely rewarding as I’m sure you know so I’m delighted to have gained a few initial projects that has allowed me to do that… long may that continue!
The approach
I am a planner and data geek at heart. I like there to be a rough plan of attack to achieve an objective, the objective to be clear, people to be accountable for their tasks within that plan and to see tasks getting ticked off with celebrated milestones along the way.
Pretty straight forward really! Being organised does not mean being rigid and remaining flexible is so important to get things over the line and done. Even those who claim rebellion towards bureaucracy can surprisingly, or unsurprisingly, succumb to it.
I have never wanted to conform to the norm and once said “I don’t like being told what to do” in an interview then received feedback that I should not have said that.
I meant it, but perhaps not in the way it might have been heard. I believe wholeheartedly in getting people on your side when a task or mission is at hand.
Taking on their thoughts and ideas regardless of where they sit and pushing the “all in it together” motto as a way of achieving the goal rather than “do this (or else)”.
I’ve often read this type of approach in academic leadership and management texts and thought “obviously!”, and many will say it’s their approach too but the truth is in what actually happens rather than a written charter so being there alongside my team and/or colleagues, being visible, approachable and open-minded is how I’ve tackled many of the objectives I’ve been tasked with.
Ok so on with what I actually do! For the rest of this article I’m going to write about some of the initiatives I’ve worked on and developed to give you a taster of where my focuses and areas of expertise lay with regards to my new venture, Elsie Waves.
I like to think I could turn my hand to most things, but we all have our sweet spots and data management, analysis, efficiencies, forecasting and inventory management are up there for me.
At BrewDog, growth was phenomenal, and they were able to invest in equipment as they grew. However, there were plenty of times when capacity was capped, and in other businesses, many examples where capacity appears to be maxed out despite on paper having more available (e.g. a line runs at 5,000 cans per hour, you expect to produce 5,000 cans per hour).
“Something that is often overlooked is OEE (overall equipment effectiveness) and the tracking of your line performance.”
Something that is often overlooked is OEE (overall equipment effectiveness) and the tracking of your line performance. If you are only producing 2,500 cans per hour despite having a greater demand, then you are only achieving 50% OEE.
Why is this?
Well, it can be a multitude of things – slow start ups, complex SKU ranges and inventory policies meaning constant changeovers, faulty parts on the line, crew breaks not optimised, shift handovers, unclear schedules, poor packaging materials… the list can go on and on!
Unless you track and understand where your downtime is occurring and review the outputs from this, you are unlikely to improve your OEE, therefore, your output will continue to be below its potential.
It is not just the packaging lines that should be measured for performance. Beer yields throughout the process can be traced, not just from wort to final package but at a number of steps along the way (de-yeast, de-hop, filtration etc) so that you truly understand where your biggest losses are occurring in order to apply the right focus on reducing the overall impact.
Every 1% of beer lost can add up to huge sums of over expenditure and lost revenue every year so allowing time within your operation to continuously improve yields and OEE can reap extremely worthwhile benefits.
I have built a number of models and analysed many scenarios providing feedback and suggestions, working alongside production teams also, in order to achieve a higher output and satisfy the customer demand which of course is what we all should be focussed on.
Getting your demand forecasts as close to accurate as possible is paramount to stabilising the cost and supply of your ingredients and packaging materials.
It means growers and manufacturers can plan ahead, build in some buffers or collaborate with others to secure your supply.
Better foresight can lead to longer term relationships, and especially if you are planning to grow as a business, you can work with suppliers to become more efficient as well as reduce the need for last minute orders, priority shipping etc which often leads to unnecessary overspend.
Of course, it is not 100% guaranteed but by working with your supplier by sharing data, trends, projections and plans you are reducing risk whilst also strengthening your relationship.
Across various roles I have built forecasting tools to project ingredient and material requirements which we shared with our suppliers.
It stabilised the supply, reduced priority shipments, pricing was more secure and favourable as the foresight for increased volumes were shared and suppliers were keener to work with us on experimentals, R&D, data sharing and selections.
A model does not need to be complex and once you have a template set up it can be updated easily.
When building a tool to carry out calculations, the trick is always to have the future in mind so that you reduce time and effort going forward.
Spend a bit more time in getting it setup so that your daily or weekly reviews are carried out at a glance or by exception and then you all of sudden have hours back each week to focus on other value adding.
“When building a tool to carry out calculations, the trick is always to have the future in mind so that you reduce time and effort going forward.”
Coupling with the above is the development of an inventory model for raw materials and finished goods to create a fixed repeating schedule. We often talk about getting into a rhythm but what does that mean?
People go the gym on the same day and/or time every week, they go to bed at the same time at night, get up at the same time in the morning, they have team briefings at the same time each week or month, they walk the dog at the same time each day… these are all patterns and they’re easy to remember because you always do it at the same time so you “get into a rhythm”.
If you apply the same logic to a production schedule or a supply planning activity for your materials, then you get into the habit of always doing the task and therefore the task becomes easier to remember and do.
Of course, when it comes to beer (and all consumer demand driven products) there will be seasonality, peaks and troughs, NPD and various other factors (lockdown!!) that affect what is required.
But in many cases the schedule can remain the same, except for an adjustment to the volume that you schedule.
If you produce something every four weeks then sometimes you might do 100 of it and the next time you might do 200 – but it’s the same item being produced so every one knows we are doing that item today and the inventory model can be set to know that this item is going to be replenished today.
Putting in place semi-fixed production frequencies will help your teams get into a rhythm, be more expectant of what’s coming up (and hopefully therefore more prepared) and your safety stocks will be replenished regularly so that the overall stock level can remain low, beer stays fresh and availability remains high.
An important factor amongst all of this is cost. You know your labour costs because you’ve got your schedule set up, you know your material and ingredient costs because you’ve stabilised your supply with forward projections and you know your equipment and yield efficiencies because you are measuring them and can therefore apply the cost of them to your overall model.
You can get a lot more complex in all of these areas but in very simple terms these inputs and performance outputs will allow you to put together a decent cost of goods model which you use for budgeting overall spend as well as individual finished goods items allowing you to pitch to customers at a more accurate margin.
I’ve prepared a few of these over the years and have found the simpler the better and more likely you are to maintain them as well as be able to compare the actual cost to the planned cost which can of course be something entirely different. Knowing why and how it is different is critical.
Having all the production data stored in a centralised system with one truth source so there’s no copying and pasting from one sheet to another, there’s no multiple copies of the production schedule, records are up to date, your material and ingredient usage log links to your brew batch and finished products all makes life so much easier when you want to know how much you’ve produced, how much it cost you, how much more you need to produce and when you need to top up your raw materials.
Spreadsheets can suffice with the right intel in setting them up and clear ownership of the data within your teams – or look at PowerApps, something I discovered recently which could totally revolutionise and replace the need for complex ERP or SCM systems within SMEs.
That is a whole heap of rambling from me! I hope you find the above insightful in some way. Probably for some of the newer breweries out there it’s a bit more useful than for those who have been plying their trade for years but there’s always room for improvement and I’m always keen to hear from people who need a bit of support in delivering that.
Thanks for reading and keep on brewing!
