New Belgium Brewing Company simplifies sales operations with Flintfox

New Belgium Brewing Company, headquartered in Fort Collins, Colorado, is a 100% employee owned business and brews craft beer and beverages. New Belgium is the fourth largest craft brewery and in 2014 brewed 945,000 barrels of beer.

Why they chose Flintfox

• Business processes are streamlined and they are able to mitigate financial risks to the company.
• Sales teams are now able to focus on selling rather than balancing and reconciling excel spreadsheets every month.
• Not just using Flintfox at the customer item level, they are also using it at the site item level to help with forecasting production for a new brewery before it has been completed.

The Challenge

New Belgium Brewing was managing most trade activity through spreadsheets. The company sought a replacement solution that would enhance their business operations by giving them more visibility of promotions and discounts as well as automated trade agreements. 

New Belgium used Excel spreadsheets for discount tracking and had to rely on manual updates to the spreadsheet and biweekly email updates to their sales team. This made it difficult to accurately estimate the monthly liability around their promotional discounts and manage cash flow associated with invoices. With a new facility opening, the brewery also needed a solution that was not overly complex to make user adoption easier across the company.

The Solution

New Belgium decided to go with a combination of an ERP system and the Flintfox solution to manage their trade spend more effectively and enhance relationships with their customers. The Flintfox solution allows them to apply rule-based pricing configuration that supports volume-based and percentage discounting, eliminating the need to track discounts through the use of spreadsheets and bi-weekly updates emailed to their sales teams.

New Belgium discovered that the Flintfox solution could be used not just at the customer item level, but also at the site item level to help with the forecasting of production at their new facility in Asheville, North Carolina. They are able to plan what item combinations are going to be made in Colorado and what will be made in North Carolina before the new brewery has even been completed. New Belgium is able to efficiently track their monthly liabilities through bulk price requests that can be used to retrieve the price for multiple combinations of customers or products and transactions in one batch.

This allows the business to manage its cash flow around invoices far more effectively as estimates are a lot more accurate. This is an essential feature as the company has relied on Excel spreadsheets in the past to pull pricing for orders and products, which was time-consuming and inefficient.

Flintfox has simplified the way New Belgium Brewery conducts its sales and operations.

New Belgium Brewing now has the ability to:

• Forecast production for both the Colorado and Asheville breweries
• Utilize Flintfox budget planning so that they can leverage the revenue management intelligence to accrual forward in time
• Allow the Sales team to focus on selling rather than balancing excel spreadsheets at the end of every month
• Update deals and promotions as they happen, without changes having to be made manually across their systems
• Track liabilities efficiently and effectively manage cash flow around invoices
• Analyze the profitability of individual products and performance of promotions

‘New Belgium was having trouble capturing its monthly liabilities associated with some of our customers, we used Excel spreadsheets heavily in order to capture this activity and at best they were estimates. Utilizing Flintfox allows us to eliminate that entire process.’