Independent brewery Adnams set up its own bonded warehouse, cut costs and improved its inventory management – all off the back of a Duty and Warehouse Management system from RedPrairie.
With the new system the Southwold-based brewery can delay payment of all customs duties and Value Added Tax until the latest possible time, usually after the goods have left the warehouse.
Andrew Brookes, brewing and brands business account, Adnams, says: “When we built our new warehouse, it was designed to store more goods. We wanted to use this space and reduce our costs.
“As we were storing product at a third party facility, we were paying someone else to do something we could easily do ourselves. We also realised that we could make significant cost savings by running our own bonded warehouse, and to do this, we needed a fully compliant duty management solution.”
The project began just before Christmas 2008, and went live just after Easter 2009, when Adnams started to pull stock back from the third party warehouse. In two weeks Adnams had enough stock available in its warehouse to pick orders. Brookes says: “We needed to be completely confident with the go-live, as it was vital we continued to fulfil customer orders.”
Adnams is using the warehouse management module that is integrated within the Duty Management system. Before rolling this out, it was using a stock control system that was part of its accounts package.
“Although we have only recently gone live, we can see that our cost savings predictions are on track. We can manage our inventory much more tightly as we have greater stock control, which is vital when you’re working with products such as vintage wine, which isn’t a low-cost product. We’re also delighted about bringing the process back in house,” says Brookes.
“We chose the RedPrairie solution as it’s extremely user friendly, guiding the user through all processes. It is functionally rich, with great tools that did exactly what we wanted.
“However, the key factor was the level of RedPrairie’s experience regarding the legal requirements. We were confident that they had the expertise required to ensure we were fully compliant with the HM Revenue and Customs legislation required to run a bonded warehouse.”
