Case study: Pelican Brewery bottles up a new management system

Brewery management encompasses more than just tasting the profits, brewery mangers need to be across all departments, ensure production lines are working and still coordinate staff.

Jason Schlebach is the brewery manager at Oregon-based Pelican Brewery, he spoke to Digital Nation on how implementing manufacturing software creates efficiency within the factory.

Schlebach said since implementing the software towards the end of 2021, they immediately saw improvements within their systems.

“We've been able to put hard numbers to a lot of these downtime efforts that we've been seeing, and we know our issues. We're able to finally put timestamps to that, quantify that and put a financial number to that,” he said.

The team at Pelican Brewery implemented Australian-based OFS software to improve the way they work within the business.

“The staff understood that this is something that we can work towards making better and wasn't necessarily brought on as a nanny tool. This wasn't something to keep an eye on them to make sure they're all doing their job,” Schlebach said.

“This turned into a very friendly competitive thing of how can we get today's number even higher than yesterday's number? Having our Pelican staff involved with that has been beneficial. They've all stepped in and acknowledged the purpose of this software and what it's done.”

Using OFC, Schlebach said he wants to figure out where they can start nitpicking and optimising start up and cleaning in place times.

“Anything that is small minutes here and there, we can nitpick. We went through a similar process with our brewing operation when we're scaling up, we increased from our three vessels to our five vessels system and we were capped out at three batches a day,” he said.

“Through small nitpicking and automation, we were able to double that and get six batches in a day.”

Schlebach said improving in those minutes in small processes makes a big difference.

“Figuring out all the little spots of someone thinks ‘that only takes five minutes, so I'm not worried about that’. But that five minutes over three or four times, adds up and 10 minutes here three or four times. It's up for you know you got a couple extra hours in your day,” he ended.