Founded in 2006 and headquartered in Portland, Oregon, Brew Dr. is a leading U.S. brand of Kombucha. The company began as a small brewing operation in the basement of a tea house that grew rapidly in popularity. The founders decided to bottle the product, and the company was born. The company has strong values, and they work hard to be carbon neutral, reduce waste, and limit emissions from their operations. They are a certified B corporation, as they seek to make their business a force for good.
Brew Dr. had been planning in MS Excel for their Demand Management and TPM functions with no ability to guide operational planning from demand management. Their planning process was an elaborate hodgepodge of unconnected documents and activities.
The business lacked accurate forecast generation or any qualitative statistical modeling. Also, there was an inefficient enrichments management process in place, which was used to capture the necessary inputs of market intelligence to apply to the forecast. Without a centralized planning system, keeping track of spending against existing promotional plans was very time-consuming. As a result, many credit requests from their hundreds of customers were not being reconciled. Also, since resources were spending their time managing spreadsheets, deductions were being paid to customers without adequate back up.
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Upon leveraging the Statistical Forecasting capabilities in Anaplan, Brew Dr. is able to immediately create a detailed and qualitative forecast to use as their baseline, something previously not possible. The enrichments process that layers in market and business intelligence assumptions allows users to manage each piece of the forecasting process in one model, with the ability to take snapshots, run scenarios, and track changes in a clean, concise format for KPI & forecast accuracy purposes,as well as, provide real-time updates to their Consensus Planning.
The forecasts will be used to get a better, more accurate, idea of the cost of promotions and related spending at their many key accounts. Tracking the actual dollars spent in Anaplan will reduce the time needed to reconcile spends, as well as, reducing the number and cost of deductions.
With the success of demand planning and TPM within Anaplan, the organization will continue on their Anaplan journey with additional use cases coming in the near future. The current roadmap includes capacity planning, FP&A, and freight optimization.
Brew Dr. chose the Anaplan platform as their solution because they determined that a customized, rapidly deployed solution was the best way to realize their vision. Deploying a new demand planning process that starts with a statistical forecasting model and focuses on developing a cross-functional consensus was the foundational first step. This solution includes new ways of enriching their final forecasts with information from Sales and Finance. The effect of historical promotions is automatically decomposed from their sales history so that new promotional plans can be added to the statistically generated forecasts later in this process.
To better manage the promotions and trade funds budgeting and spend tracking process, an Anaplan model was designed. Account managers enter funding plans at the beginning of the year in Anaplan and this, combined with the forecast from the new demand planning process, is used to track actuals versus the forecasted plan.
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