When we first started at Raasay Distillery, we used paper books like all other distilleries. We realised very quickly that we needed a system if we were going to grow the business. We started looking around, and we had one, but the way it was financed just really didn’t work.
MasterDistiller allowed us to record all the different parts of the business. It lets us look forward, and it’s allowed us to scale the business rapidly and have confidence looking to the future.
That’s one of the biggest differentiators of MasterDistiller. The team you’re dealing with is the team that wrote it. They completely understand the industry. They built the system to record everything we want as a distiller, so when you ask a question, even in technical detail, they understand exactly what you’re doing. You can tweak everything, change everything, and at the same time it just works for us.
It’s been an absolute game changer for us, because we pride ourselves on giving our customers complete transparency. We want to be able to tell them everything from the cut point to the type of yeast to the barley variety. We can put in a cask number and all of that information comes up in MasterDistiller.
My background was in the food industry, so traceability is absolutely huge. When we designed Raasay Distillery, we wanted to be able to trace everything back to the cask. Whether you’re going forwards or backwards, MasterDistiller allows us to do that.
That’s the beauty of MasterDistiller, when we started distilling, we thought we just needed a production log. In actual fact, that needs to talk to every part of the business. MasterDistiller allows us to do that. You can connect to finance, so we know our unit costs and can follow it all the way through. We can go back, look at things and graph out whatever we want. Basically it integrates the whole business into one system.
MasterDistiller is absolutely critical to our business. It genuinely allows us to plan 25 years ahead. Whisky is a long-term business, and having the confidence to know our stock profile for the next 25 years feeds into bottling releases, planning and the financials behind it.
It’s crucial to long-term planning, because we’re laying down casks for 10, 20, even 50 years’ time. In MasterDistiller we can see the different cask types, see how many we’re going to need, and plan what we still need to lay down based on that. For The Draam, we’ve got a six-cask recipe, and we need to be able to look at that 10, 20, 50 years ahead. MasterDistiller allows us to do that.