When the line is moving, Australian craft brewers are among the most efficient producers in manufacturing. But production downtime is common and costly. OFS CEO James Magee explains how brewers can get back to what they love, making beer.
The craft beer industry is a highly passionate one. Many companies and founders get started to build on their love
of beer and quickly find themselves immersed in one of the most engaging and collaborative industries in the world.
In Australia, the sector is booming – buoyed by a growing ‘buy local’ mindset, changing attitudes to the desired quality of the beer we drink, and government incentives to put beer on a level playing field with wine producers.
OFS recently released a report analysing how efficiently tens of millions of litres of craft beer across Australia and the world is made, with the aim of finding out ‘what good looks like’ on the production line.
Data behind the draft
Good beer needs to be supported by good business, so it may surprise you to learn that the average craft brewer in Australia is only filling cans or bottles just over half (54 per cent) of the time.
For every 1000 beers made, three minutes and 12 seconds are lost to unplanned downtime on the packing line. There are dozens of reasons for this including equipment problems, raw material and packaging material issues, and human error. The end result is less beer produced at a higher cost.
Our research found that everytime a packing line is down, the opportunity cost is that 453 beers don’t get made.
Further, craft brewers spend about 49 minutes to set up a new job.
Despite these interruptions, Aussie brewers are among the most efficient producers in the food and beverage manufacturing space when the line is moving. They barely waste a drop with a 98.6 per cent score for speed and 99.7 per cent for waste management.
And while the interruptions may seem like a great challenge, they actually might represent craft brewing’s biggest opportunity.
Acting on data insights
There is often a misconception among brewers, and small-to-medium sized manufacturers more broadly, that access to the kind of data that shows where inefficiencies are and where they can be improved is prohibitively expensive and reserved for industry giants.
“There’s a difference between good beer and good business,” said co-founder of Stomping Ground Brewing Co. Guy Greenstone, who took part in the report.
“You need to know what’s happening on the production line for every single run, know your best performing batches and brews, product and pack types, how efficient your operations and your brewery really are, and how you compare to other more established brewers in the industry,” Greenstone says.
There are simple measurements, such as overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) – the degree to which a manufacturing plant is truly productive – which can show where the gaps are and how they can be addressed, not just in your own brewery but how it compares to others across the country and worldwide.
For every 1000 beers made, three minutes and 12 seconds are lost to unplanned downtime on the packing line.
Taking the time to understand your OEE and taking data away from pen and paper into easily accessible and digestible software systems puts beer and the packing line in a whole different focus, and one that can lead to much higher efficiency.
This isn’t about getting bogged down in data – it’s actually the opposite. It’s about making more beer, better days for people on the packing line, and taking your business to the next level – getting your beer into more glasses, bottles, cans, hearts and minds of the people who love what you make.
James Magee is CEO of Australian manufacturing performance software company OFS. See what good really looks like on your packing line by downloading the full report at ofsystems.com.
