West Indies Rum Distillery’s Integration with Vicinity Software
In 2014, West Indies Rum Distillery implemented VicinityBrew with Microsoft Dynamics to assist with the data management needs of their high-quality production. The initial goals of the project were to gain greater visibility into their production processes and to connect data across departments for a more complete view of company operations.
Although he was not involved in the initial selection of Vicinity Software at West Indies, Don Benn, Operations Manager, was brought on to the Vicinity Software project later to lead the onsite implementation.
Located at Brighton, Black Rock in the southern parish of St. Michael on the island of Barbados is the West Indies Rum Distillery. The main brands bottled at this facility however, are the well known Barbadian Cockspur Fine Rum along with Malibu, Gilbey’s and Popov. These fine spirits are available throughout most of the world including the United Kingdom, most of the Continental Europe, the United States of America and of course Barbados.
This large facility here in Barbados can produce up to nine million litres of pure alcohol every year and has the storage capacity for about one and a half million litres as bulk storage in their stainless steel tanks and the twenty thousand barrels made of American white oak, each with a capacity of two hundred litres.
We followed up with West Indies Rum Distillery’s Don Ben to see how things are going regarding their implementation with VicinityBrew Software and Microsoft Dynamics.
“After using Vicinity for a while, we now realize that manually entering batches was a very inefficient way to be processing our manufacturing information,” explains Don Benn. “So, we are now using Vicinity to enter all of our batches linked to Dynamics. We put batches on hand, created issue batch/receipt batch and put finished goods on hand. We basically put all formulations in Vicinity, creating batches for production, whether it’s a mix batch or fill batch, we start the process of releasing and then posting batches”
Ben went on to confirm that West Indies has been able to consolidate their data across departments as they originally were hoping to be able to do.
“All of our processing activities are now done by the department that generates the information. Before, we would submit paper reports or Excel spreadsheets to the accounting department, and they would enter the info, so that accounting would know what all the costs of production were, but those in manufacturing wouldn’t know, because they were just reporting on the volumes, or quantity used,” explained Ben. “But now all the batch processing is done by the manufacturing department so it means there’s a greater visibility for everyone. We are no longer relying on our accounts department to know how well financially we’re doing, we can always tell if we ran over budget, which is one of the benefits of the system. Today, we’re able to capture that information at the source.”
West Indies Rum went on to describe that they were also able to get great support from the VicinityBrew team, including Randy Smith, CEO and Jennifer Sweat, Lead Technical Support, whenever there was an issue.
**West Indies Rum Distillery Ltd. is still a customer in 2023.
VicinityBrew with Microsoft Dynamics enables breweries to meet fluctuating demands of customer requirements for quality, delivery, and price. By automating and integrating critical information along the supply chain, VicinityBrew Software is able to increase operational efficiency and reduce costs for growing craft breweries. Key functionalities include centralized recipe management, digitized brew logs, quality control, lot traceability and recall, TTB reporting, inventory control, production planning, and scheduling.
If you want to learn more about how VicinityBrew Software can help your brewery, contact us today!
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