New Belgium Aligns Operations for Opportunity

Like most fans of New Belgium Brewing (www.newbelgium.com), Sales Director Joe Menetre remembers exactly where he was when he tasted his first Fat Tire Amber Ale: Flagstaff, Ariz., 1993, at a bike shop, after a long ride through the desert.

Ten years later, Menetre often bikes to New Belgium, where he oversees 100 sales reps in 18 states. "New Belgium has grown from a family-run, grassroots operation with three sales folks, where people made decisions based on gut feeling," he says. "We didn't want to change that intuitive, creative drive, but we needed better IT tools to support our growth."

Inaccessible Information

Menetre's biggest challenge was to improve the flow of sales information from reps in the field into the brewery, and from the brewery back to the sales reps. New Belgium's forecasting and manufacturing systems contained important business information, yet did not integrate well with its Novell infrastructure and e-mail solution.

New Belgium works with 120 distributors to sell its craft beers to retailers and to obtain the data describing these sales. Historically, this data was faxed to New Belgium's head office where staff re-keyed it into the company's systems. Its existing solution to deliver the data to the field was error prone and unreliable.

"It's difficult to understand business opportunities when you have little control over the information," says Menetre. "We needed to take ownership of our sales information. We needed to consolidate and disseminate it to the field to help reps communicate, and to help us make better sales strategy decisions."

Building an Infrastructure

New Belgium chose an integrated Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) solution to align the company's IT infrastructure with its business strategies. This meant going from isolated data repositories and disconnected communications to having a consolidated customer data warehouse, automated information flow, access to in-house reports and improved collaboration among the field reps.

A sales data warehouse was built that contains data from its business systems. Microsoft technologies automate daily imports of retail sales data from the distributors into the data warehouse. Microsoft SQL Server analysis services and reporting services make this sales information available via reports on the Web for sales reps.

"Now we can tap data about our retail customers -- a key capability for us to become a leading brewer," says Menetre. "Greater account visibility helps us fix problems before they get serious. Better access to sales analytics at points of distribution helps us to improve sales strategies and gain visibility into new opportunities in the off-premise channel that we should be focusing on."

The new solution also supports the company's sustainability efforts. Microsoft messaging, collaboration and mobile technologies enable sales reps to stay connected with the brewery and each other.

"Our Microsoft Web conferencing solution helps us expand our markets and reduce our carbon footprint," concludes Menetre. "Instead of face-to-face meetings we'll use Office Live meetings. Technology that supports our sales growth and our green philosophy will always be part of New Belgium's future."