Launched in 2007, Coldstream Brewery is now a well-established business with a popular restaurant and bar, with its beers and organic ciders sold all over Australia and into Asia.
With their 2011 trade sales growing by almost 50%, founding Directors, Rohan Peters and Mike Basset decided in 2012 to invest in an in-house solution to control their business growth.
Basset says that with the 2013 business predictions in place, they decided to strike while the iron was hot.
“With sales predicted to exceed $5M in 2013, and beer and cider production set to proceed 480,000 litres, the business needed a program that was user friendly yet able to store, manage, track all key performance indicators (KPI’s) and notify us, as required,” he says.
As such, nine months ago, the team decided to run with a “cloud computing” option – a subscription-based, pay-as-you-go service from MAUS Business System, specifically their KPI Dashboard.
“None of us really knew what to expect from this internet-based, business intelligence program,” Basset says. “Except that it used a “pay as you go” subscription process and came with a strong recommendation.”
Apparently it was within the first two weeks of using the dashboard that Coldstream began to see its value.
The dashboard is essentially a tool to help plan marketing objectives, prepare forecasts and monitor distribution – as well as keeping staff more accountable and motivated, according to Basset.
“Now when we set goals, their progress and outcomes are easily tracked,” he says. “We can also see in an instant, if production drops or sales start to lag in any particular area to determine where attention is needed”.
While technology like this was previously unavailable to small companies, the advent of subscription-based services and cloud technology as brought it into the realms of possibility.
For Coldstream, its subscription works out to be less than $10 per user, per year.