Established in 1875, AG Barr is an independent soft drink manufacturer based in Cumbernauld, Scotland, producing 1.5 million liters of product per day. Its diverse beverage portfolio spans 48 markets and includes established brands such as Irn-Bru, Rubicon and Strathmore Water. AG Barr has experienced a period of sustained growth and plans to capitalize and maintain this by continuing to invest in all aspects of its manufacturing infrastructure. The company has plans to upgrade existing warehouses and construct a new automated warehouse.
AG Barr needed a new inventory management solution for its raw materials warehouse, which housed everything from raw ingredients to the syrups used in the production of the final product. A crucial component of the manufacturing process, the raw materials warehouse contained thousands of pounds worth of perishable stock.
The existing manual, paper-based processes used to record inventory created a 48-hour lag, as counts were keyed into the back office. Even then, the only view of inventory AG Barr had was a single snapshot in time, leading to a genuine risk that products weren’t being used in sequence and waste may be occurring.
AG Barr had five key requirements that its new inventory management solution would have to provide:
AG Barr selected Cloud Inventory because of its ERP Accelerators for JDE and the Enterprise Printing Platform™ (EPP). These features would ensure AG Barr could solve its existing challenges and future-proof itself for scalable growth. Cloud Inventory’s products were designed to seamlessly integrate with AG Barr’s ERP, Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, which made implementation times favorable and allowed the company to swiftly see a return on investment.
AG Barr’s digital transformation of its inventory processes has already generated a positive return on investment. By removing the 48-hour inventory snapshot and having a full real-time view of its inventory, AG Barr has been able to make additional configurations to its backend ERP system and processes. The company now has standard places for inventory, reduced picking times, and a warning process if any inventory item is running low.
AG Barr plans to extend its use of Cloud Inventory in additional sites, continuing to optimize the movement of inventory, before focusing on the construction of a fully automated warehouse.
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