Beverage manufacturers are faced with a competitive market, tight labor pool, inflation, and trends showing regularly shifting consumer purchase behaviors. It’s more important than ever before to use technology that modernizes beverage businesses to keep brands agile and in sync with consumer demand.
Technology that supports data sharing across the tiers of the supply chain allows a brewery, distillery, winery or another beverage manufacturer to:
● Stand out and ensure brand consistency at every touch point
● Forecast accurately and sell more beer
● Save time by adapting production levels with agility as market demand shifts
Fortunately for beverage producers looking to modernize their business, there are new digital tools to connect to consumer demand that also save time and help sell more liquid.
Maintain Market Presence And Brand Consistency
With the e-eommerce boom and purchasing power at consumers’ fingertips (literally), manufacturers need to ensure that savvy buyers have access to timely, accurate, and rich product information or they risk losing sales.
Currently, many manufacturers manually send batches of product information to distributors, online marketplaces, and retailers via email which leaves room for misuse of that information like displaying an outdated label or showing a product description riddled with spelling mistakes because someone at the retailer level manually typed it into their system.
A Product Information Management (PIM) system helps overcome these challenges, putting beverage manufacturers in the driver’s seat to manage and share product data and digital assets from a centralized platform that everyone in the supply chain pulls from.
In a growing e-commerce sector, it’s all too common for distributors and retailers – or worse, –consumers– to notice inaccurate or missing product information. The best, modern PIM solutions allow beverage producers to maintain and control Universal Product Code (UPC) standards, product descriptions and upload product images, sell sheets, and more, in real-time as it is shared across the supply chain.
A PIM solution allows distributors, retailers, and consumers to actively engage with a brand along all supply chain touch points, an important capability given the speed at which products are introduced. With a PIM in place, distributors and retailers no longer need to manually enter new product info into their systems prior to ordering.
Using a PIM makes it easy to get up and running with new products and brings a sigh of relief to manufacturers, knowing that the product details — from UPCs to beverage descriptions — will stay consistent through the supply chain.
Save Time And Sell More Product
The speed of brand innovation in the modern agile marketplace has pushed old ways of building demand and taking and fulfilling orders to their breaking point. Forward-looking manufacturers are turning to online ordering portals for their distributors just as they’ve seen them used on e-commerce sites at the consumer level.
These ordering portals, also referred to as e-commerce platforms, update product availability and facilitate transactions between the manufacturer and the distributor. From advertising to ordering to payment and fulfillment, manufacturers get immediate time savings in the sales process.
Gone are the days of sifting through texts, voicemails, emails, and paper trails of distributor orders and risking human error by manually keying them in.
“The biggest pain point on the sales side is that we have distributors who want the same information for orders but we get a different form from everyone. We now have a systematic way to place orders, and have everyone on the same page,” said Bryan Wygert, VP of Sales at Stevens Point Brewing. “Having aPIM in place has saved me a ton of time. Before, I had four different places to look for orders from distributors and was inputting orders manually. Now I get time back in my day to focus on growing the business.”
Manufacturers can also promote their brand’s featured or new products and highlight discounts to encourage bulk orders at the point of a distributor’s purchase. In sync with a PIM, the platform makes it easy for manufacturers to upload sell sheets and other promotional material that distributors can immediately access and use with their customers.
At the same time, distributors can browse products at their convenience and place or update orders with a click or two. Manufacturers can set order minimums, display or hide pricing, and better highlight new or upcoming product releases.
It’s a no-brainer to end the chaos of managing distributor orders in a dozen different formats. Embracing a technology-forward approach on an e-commerce platform, manufacturers will see all orders and quotes in one place, ultimately helping to manage, forecast, and fulfill orders.
Reduce The Headache Of Demand Planning
A manufacturer’s access to its distributors’ sales and inventory data has a big impact on how it can manage its business, particularly in forecasting and demand planning. Expensive data collection, poor quality and delayed data contribute to more out-of-stocks, distributor dissatisfaction, and misalignment of goals and incentives.
A manufacturer needs more than just data visibility; the ease of access, timeliness, and accuracy of comprehensive data is important, too. Manufacturers and distributors need a single source of truth, a reliable and real-time reporting solution for data collection and aggregation. The good news is that this technology exists with a free modern distributor reporting tool.
“Technology and data are crucial,” said Terrell Davis, NFL Hall of Famer and co-founder of DEFY, a mainstream CBD beverage brand for every kind of athlete. “We need real-time information so that we can be agile and make decisions based on data. Knowing where there are out-of-stocks, underperforming stores, or distributors not making deliveries on time, is critical. We can then set a game plan to do promotions and tastings, and deploy assets to beef up areas in the moment. We wouldn’t be armed with this information if we didn’t have the technology and if we didn’t have a distributor reporting tool that enables us to say ‘here’s where we are, here’s where we need to go, and here’s what we need to do tog et this stuff moved.’”
By leveraging a PIM, ordering portal, and reporting tool, beverage manufacturers can ensure brand consistency across the supply chain, more accurately forecast productions, and easily manage orders while selling more products. Technology has become foundational to compete with agility and ultimately give consumers what they want in the world of fast-changing consumer demands and modern beverage markets.
Bill Kraich is VP of eCommerce with Encompass Technologies. Beverage manufacturers looking to connect the dots from brand to demand can visit Encompass’s Connect for Manufacturers.
