The previous blogs about optimisation in a brewery and production planning optimisation we focused on making the decision for your brewery. While being more efficient and optimising processes has value, it is important to step back a little and think about what we are actually trying to achieve. This is where other words or topics come up, such as operational research, decision support, data science, machine learning and AI. These different techniques are used to improve your brewing business by making better decisions.
Making decisions
Making decision can be easy or quite challenging. Working out what time you need to start your work day so that all tasks can be completed–probably easy. Determining what beers to brew that match the future demand of your customers, this is likely to be difficult. What ever the situation you are in, decisions are being made all of the time.
As the decisions become more challenging, technology becomes more valuable to support the decision making process. In large industries, such as energy distribution, aviation, railways and manufacturing, there is a heavy reliance of decision making technologies. This is due to the significant cost that is incurred by making the wrong decision. Statistics, machine learning, AI and optimisation are techniques commonly used in decision making.
While the decisions in your brewery may not have the scale of these large industries, that doesn’t make decision making less critical. There is a place for decision making technologies in businesses of all sizes.
Decision support tools
Previously, I have discussed optimisation. This is just one decision support tool that can be used in the brewery. The value of optimisation, over other techniques is that it aims to make the best decision using your data. I believe that optimisation is a critical decision support tool, since it takes away much complexity from the decision making process and provides you with a clear answers.
Considering production planning, heuristics or “rules of thumb” can be quite valuable too. Heuristics can provide a production plan that is feasible, but not optimal. Finding feasible production plans is something machine learning and AI is very capable of achieving.
Statistics always has a place in decision support tools. Most importantly, statistics is used to forecast future demand for your product. Accurate forecasts can drive amazing sales figures by accurately matching demand. This means less waste by producing what is wanted.
Accessing decision support tools
Being aware of decision support tools is one thing, accessing them is quite another. The good news is that most businesses have a large collection of data available for use. If you are currently using brewery management software, then you are one big step towards using decision support tools.
The next part in using decision support tools is the hardest. One way could be to train yourself. The simplest techniques to use would be statistics or machine learning. With these, you can use your data to gain insights about the past operation of your brewery to inform decisions about future operations. With statistics, this could be average output per month or the average input to yield ratio. These insights help you assess whether any changes could be made to improve your production process.
If you can’t train yourself (with busy schedules that can be hard), you can engage an expert team. Some self promoting, Efficient Brewing is equipped with extensive knowledge of optimisation and AI technologies. We can develop bespoke solutions to help you make decisions more effectively. Apart from Efficient Brewing, you can engage consultancy firms focused on optimisation and AI.
Is this for you?
The decision now is whether you need to make better decisions. You could be in a situation where you have a great handle on everything at your brewery. In this case, then decision support tools may not be necessary. You could be trying to grow your business. Therefore, some more insights may make the difference between a successful expansion or not. You could have been successful up to now, but now realising that better decisions could be valuable. Then you just need to have a conversation with experts in decision making technologies.
We all make decisions in our own way.