What is optimisation? Why do you need it for your brewery? How can you use optimisation in your brewing practice? These are all important questions that you should be asking. Lets start from the beginning and then we can see how optimisation can help improve your brewing practice.
What is optimisation?
It is likely that you have heard the word “optimisation” before, such as search engine optimisation for your website. It is just as likely that you have even used the word before. However, while it is such a general word, there is a very specific context where I will be using it.
Optimisation is a mathematical technique that is used to find the smallest (or the largest) value to a function. You may remember your high school days where you are given some function, such as y = x2 and you are asked to find the minimum. That is optimisation!
In the real world, you are not optimising such a simple function, you are trying to minimise more complex things, such as operating costs or carbon emissions. Also, the functions you are optimising would not just have a single variable x. They would have multiple different variables that feed into them. For example, your cost function could include staff, rent, electricity and ingredients. Finally, there are likely restrictions on what you can do to minimise your costs. Making this simple, the minimal cost is 0, but this means you are not producing anything. So you might have restrictions such as,
- you want to produce 2 IPAs, 3 Stouts and 1 Lager in a week,
- only have at most 3 staff members,
- and you can only work on week days.
Then you need to find the minimum cost while satisfying all of the restrictions put in place. Finding the minimum cost with restrictions is where optimisation, and more importantly optimisation software, really shines.
Why do you need optimisation?
Optimisation is about finding the minimal value given some restrictions. In the context of a brewery, this means minimising the production costs while satisfying the demand for your beers. Alternatively, it could mean minimising the time required to produce the current demand for your beers. In both cases, optimisation is about reducing the costs (either money or time) for your business. Some details about optimisation at breweries is in this blog post.
An area where optimisation can really help is production planning. That is, determining when to produce different beers, and what fermentation vessels to use, in order to satisfy demand and minimise production time. If you haven’t considered optimisation before, you likely have been successfully completing production plans without thinking about how mathematics and optimisation could help. In most cases, it is possible to find very good production plans by hand. However, when your brewery starts to grow, this can become a challenging task, taking days or even weeks to produce. Also, production plans made by hand just represent one possible solution, but there is no guarantee that this minimises costs or production time. This is where mathematics and optimisation can be really helpful. Using optimisation means that you can get the best possible solution that minimises your production costs or time.
How can you use optimisation?
Optimisation solution typically come in the form of software. I gave a talk about the process involved in developing brewery optimisation software to the Operational Research Society. You can see from this talk, there there are a number of factors that need to be taken into account when optimising production plans.
One of the most interesting things about optimisation is that every business is different, so every business need a unique optimisation solution. While there are many similarities between businesses, it is getting the unique details right that will mean you can truly optimise your brewery. A great idea is to try and use some generic optimisation software, just to see how much of a reduction in your costs is possible. If you are convinced that optimisation is for you, then a bespoke solution is something that you should pursue.
At Efficient Brewing, we have a test system that you can use to investigate the use of optimisation. We will work with you in setting up the software and evaluating its potential. Then if a bespoke solution is what you desire, then we will ensure that we capture the special details about your brewery to ensure that we minimise the costs for producing great beer.