Digital transformation of brewery operations

Background

Namibia Breweries chose Keyrus to assist with the company-wide digital transformation. The brewery recognised the importance of speedy, effective data processing and accurate reporting for sound business decisions and competitive advantage and appointed Keyrus to help instill a true data culture within its operations.

Challenge

The Namibia Brewery needed to enhance its business intelligence (BI) competency and become more data-driven. The leadership recognised the need to embark on a significant digital transformation journey and required a leading BI tool to manage big data.

Approach

The first step was to migrate reporting from a legacy system into a modern, cloud-based analytics BI platform, Tableau. Keyrus designed an innovative solution that allows self-service, promotes rapid user adoption, and offers views tailored to different areas of the business depending on what works best for users: some reports resemble the previous legacy reports, and other dashboards present data more visually, appealing to the innovators in the business. The key to the success of the implementation was a focus on user acceptance and the transfer of skills to BI Champions within the customer organisation, fueled by support from the Keyrus team. The commitment of the Tableau Champions ensured the success of the organisation’s data journey. Keyrus carries out regular check-ins to ensure an agile, interactive process that encourages new ideas and ensures challenges are solved rapidly. The Tableau champions receive ongoing coaching from Keyrus’ expert consultants.

Key results

Benefits

Reporting is now real-time and Namibia Breweries benefits from reduced time to insights. This translates into a competitive advantage. Users obtain answers within hours, whereas previously this could take weeks or months. This speedy turn-around allows the business more time to scrutinise the data and ask further questions. The implementation has transformed the way different business units use data every day. Tableau dashboards are discussed each morning by the Production team, for example. The regular check-ins by Keyrus ensure an agile, interactive process that encourages new ideas and ensures challenges are solved rapidly. Several processes, including production line cleaning and maintenance prediction, are now solely driven by Tableau. In addition, a key feature of the implementation has been skills transfer. The Tableau champions receive ongoing coaching from Keyrus’ expert consultants. The brewery now has a solid foundation to enable the next phase, seamless migration to the cloud.

What our clients say

Users obtain answers within hours, where previously this could take weeks or months. This speedy turn-around allows the business more time to scrutinise the data and ask further questions.

Andre Engelbrecht, Industrial Systems Manager, Namibia Breweries Ltd

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