Colonial Brewing Co. and ZAP Data Hub

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Background

One of the first breweries to open on the coast of Western Australia, Colonial Brewing Company (CBCo) tapped its first keg in 2004. It was acquired by Colonial Leisure Group just four years later and has since been awarded Best Boutique Brewery in 2012 by the Australian Hotels Association. The company then scaled their operations and opened a second brewery in Port Melbourne in 2016.

Challenges

Faced with rapid growth, multiple data sources, a complex supply chain, and multiple sites, CBCo’s reporting processes were extremely lengthy and failed to provide the level of business insight required. ‘Before implementing ZAP Data Hub, our Business Intelligence tools couldn’t give us a view of overall sales by brand, location, customer type or sales team territory,’ explains their Business Systems Manager, Kirstie Jenkin.

‘As a result, our ability to evaluate business performance was very limited.’

The biggest challenge to reporting – and, with it, the growth of the business – was that of disparate data. And while every company is different, CBCo’s situation of untapped, unexploited data sources will be familiar to many midsize firms. Here’s how their data landscape looks:

• A combination of both ‘internal’ and ‘external’ data – CBCo defines external data as that from its indirect sales channel (two major wholesalers – ALM and Paramount – and a raft of independents) and internal data as from its direct sales channel.
• Two distinct types of customer – generating two distinct data sets. Colonial works with ‘on-premise businesses’, such as pubs, entertainment, and sporting venues, and ‘off-premise’ organizations such as retail chains and bottleshops/off-licenses.
• Multiple file types – cloud-based ERP data from QDOS (extracted into Excel via an SQL report), multiple additional Excel spreadsheets, combined with original files from wholesalers including CSVs and flat files.

Against this backdrop of a dynamic and varied data landscape, Kirstie and her team have to provide reports and analytics that, she says, ‘combine external and internal sales data to provide the detail we need about our direct and indirect sales, all of which must be generated very quickly and be completely accurate, as these reports are used by sales teams across Australia, as well as our National Sales Manager and our board, who are constantly monitoring and measuring performance.’

Solution

Colonial Brewing’s data management requirements were very clear from the outset:

• Automated access to all data sources
• Automated unification of data
• Automated preparation of data for BI analysis
• Increased speed and depth of reporting

ZAP has delivered on all four points with ZAP Data Hub, data management software that comes complete with robust data governance and security protocols.

First launched in February 2018 and used by a variety of businesses including Aston Martin, Tarmac, and Costa Coffee, ZAP Data Hub filled a void for CBCo that would otherwise have been occupied with lengthy, costly and error-prone manual data management. Thanks to ZAP Data Hub’s complete automation of data collection and unification from all sources, reports are now being generated far quicker than before, and CBCo’s BI software has become a trusted resource, measuring ROI across all its business units, breweries, office locations, and sales teams.

Benefits

The business is now able to quickly and easily cross-reference information across multiple data sources, utilizing ‘the flexibility in data access that ZAP Data Hub provides – for example, restricting views by sales territory or by user roles.’ Kirstie is also quick to praise ZAP’s data models, which ‘combine data coming into our various systems and mapping tables to translate information for consistency.’

As a result of this enhanced analysis, Colonial Brewing Company has uncovered tangible cost savings and potential business opportunities. And, in addition to faster reporting, Kirstie now describes CBCo as a ‘business equipped with knowledge, accessible and timely data. We are extremely happy with both the product and our level of service.’