SweetWater Brewing Co. has signed a multi-year licensing agreement for Halo’s Forecasting and Demand Planning platform. Halo is an analytics software and advisory services provider which offers customers a blend of technology to manage demand forecasts, inventory and supplier relationships. Halo’s Advanced Information Hub is a first-of-its kind solution to help companies leverage all their corporate data to generate new insight for competitive advantage.
To sustain profitable growth, SweetWater’s senior leaders chose Halo to improve the speed and accuracy of production forecasting to ensure fresh beer is available in the market at all times.
“SweetWater continues to invest in processes and programs like Halo’s that foster seamless interaction with our distributors, allowing us to deliver the freshest beer in America,” said Jennifer Hendricks, head of financial planning and analysis for SweetWater.
Halo’s Forecasting and Demand Planning solutions deliver two important benefits that SweetWater prioritized during the vendor selection process. First, automatically consolidating data from Vermont Information Processing (VIP), Microsoft Dynamics GP and Excel saves time and produces more accurate forecasts providing a more comprehensive view of market conditions.
Second, SweetWater can now review forecasts by distributor, by brand and by SKU. This information can then be rolled up into dashboards to improve management of the distributors’ and brewery’s days-on-hand inventory. Moreover, the system will generate an ideal or “recommended” order, useful for benchmarking order volume from distributors and for synchronizing expected orders with the master production plan.
“The team at SweetWater built a great business thanks to strong leadership, hard work and superior products,” said Keith Peterson, president and CEO at Halo. “To achieve their growth and margin goals, they had to put more emphasis on operational excellence and the automated decision-support tools that underpin that effort.”
