The Power of Insight: Unlocking Smarter Decisions at Biebod Distillery

Biebod Distillery was no longer a scrappy start-up. We had teams spread across the country, even the globe. With stakeholders upon stakeholders, each looking at things differently, Chloe, our Finance Director, faced the monumental task of providing tailored, flexible, actionable insights as well as stakeholder management and those business heartbeat monthly performance reviews with each department. Her bank facility update needed LoA reporting by age of youngest spirit, Ben’s Ops team needed bulk litres for warehouse capacity, David’s sales team were constantly looking at bottle and case numbers, and investors were keeping a hawk-eye view on cash consumption and working capital.

The hard work of collecting data was done, but transforming it into meaningful insights was the next frontier. Disparate reports, manual data manipulation, and the sheer volume of information made it difficult to answer critical business questions quickly. We needed to democratise access and understanding of the critical data from a single source of truth.

With MasterDistiller x Odoo, the power of connected data shone through. Its templated favourites and super flexible reporting (any field input (!) to it can be flexibly reported on or extracted out with ease) unleashed data across the business and the self-support knowledge base helped teams leverage the system for their own unique needs.

For the Sales and Finance Teams:

• Revenue Bridges helped create a deeper, data-driven, understanding of that target miss. It wasn’t just £50k lower than planned, it was £65k lower from volumes in the core product category, but with £10k made back from higher volumes in the special release category. We also had a £15k adverse variance from the average pricing achieved on the special releases and a £20k favourable variance from the price rises we achieved on the core category in the UK Off-Trade.

• Margin Bridges helped bring that data-driven insight down the P&L. We could pinpoint exactly why gross margin was down. Was it product mix, average pricing or unit costs? Being up 1.6% on gross margin we pinpointed that 0.4% of an adverse variance was unit cost and whilst we gained 0.5% on average sales price p/unit we also gained 1.5% from product mix being skewed more towards the special releases. Helping us focus in on that unit cost issue to drive margin up further as volumes moved back towards our core categories in the next quarter.
• And so, so much more…average sales prices per product, channel, and market; number of outlets; depletion rates per market; outreach pace; margins or pricing outside guardrails; and recency, frequency, value reports on key accounts/customers. These insights helped David’s team refine their sales strategy and outreach, driving revenues up by 10% above the year’s target.

For the Ops Team:

• Stock take variations by component, invoice vs. despatch timings, customer service tickets and resolution timings, unit cost variations on our procurement, stock hold volumes and locations were all available at the click of a button for Ben and team. This allowed them to pinpoint inefficiencies and optimise workflows.
• Setting minimum stock holds and automated put-away rules helped cut down any unnecessary admin time in the team and let them re-focus on quality control checks.

For the Distillers and Warehouse Managers:

• Simple and effective reporting to answer key questions: “What liquid stock have we got in the warehouses versus our bottling plan?” “What are our maturation losses by cask type and by age?” “Why is there a spike in operational losses whenever Steve is doing the Vattings?!” “On those peated spirit runs, what are our production metrics looking like, are they consistent? Have we been using too much energy last week per LoA? Did we ever see that saving from insulating the pipes or switching fuel types?”
• If those casks in warehouse 3 were nosing a little off (or tasted exceptional, let’s isolate for special release!), we could quickly trace where else that batch of local heritage grain malt from farmer Sue was used and get them all checked out – simple click-through and drill-down features made this achievable in seconds, not hours.

For the Brand Home Managers:

• “How many of that distillery exclusive have we sold and what have we got left in stock?” “Are there any more of that Humboltdii cask to do another one?” “How many tours have we had through and what’s the bottle sales?” “How do we track time on that project for the new tasting room expansion?”

Early Wins that Compound :: The simple, consistent data capture at every stage – production (Part 1), maturation (Part 2), vatting and bottling (Part 4), sales (Parts 5 & 6), and fulfilment (Part 7) culminates in this powerful reporting capability. The “early win” of digitising processes meant that by now Anya and team have a rich, interconnected dataset. This allows Chloe to generate complex reports in minutes, not days, and for every team member to access the specific insights they need, fostering a truly data-driven decision making culture. This compounding effect led to an overall reduction in administrative reporting time by over 60% across the business and those quarterly Board reports started taking hours to prepare, not weeks !

We’ve honed in on the present, optimising every process with data-driven precision. But what does the future bring? As technology continues to accelerate and the world of consumers evolves, what could the distillery of tomorrow look like, and how do we prepare for it? That’s the exciting final chapter of our story…

Ready to explore how MasterDistiller x Odoo can help your distillery navigate the future?

• Book a Demo: Visit master-distiller.com/demo to see the system in action.
• Contact Us: Reach out to [email protected] or call +44 (0) 131 564 0562 to discuss your project.
• Share your thoughts! Tag us on LinkedIn or drop us a note with what process you would automate first in your distillery to prepare for the future? Or what chapters you’ve had in your journey you want written about in our upcoming posts??