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Inspired by Belgian brewers during a European bike trip, Jeff Lebesch returned to the United States, set up a homebrew operation in the basement of his Colorado home, and started producing Belgian-style ales. In 1991, this basement operation became New Belgium Brewing, perhaps best known for its popular Fat Tire Amber Ale. Over the past 16 years, the homebrew operation has grown to become the third largest craft brewer in the United States.
For the past 10 years, the company used a Novell-based directory, file, print, and e-mail system, primarily to share files and documents among employees and to communicate through e-mail. For some time, this infrastructure sufficiently served the brewery’s needs. New Belgium’s Director of Information Technology, Jay Richardson, says, “Early on, the company primarily needed a way to share files and communicate electronically.” Most of the files it produced were created in Microsoft® Office 2000 and Microsoft Office 2003 desktop software.
But in 2003, leaders at New Belgium decided that the company needed to make better use of its wealth of business information. New Belgium uses Microsoft Dynamics™ GP business software to manage financial information and a Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 database to store and analyze this information. “We had been using Microsoft Dynamics GP primarily for finance and accounting purposes,” says Richardson. “But with the data being housed in a SQL Server database, we knew there was much more we could do to improve our insight into the business.”
To achieve better business insight, the company identified and, in 2004, embarked on an IT road map covering three key projects:
- Tapping into the enterprise resource planning (ERP) capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics GP 9.0
- Implementing a third-party sales analysis and forecasting application
- Implementing a third-party manufacturing execution system (MES)
Richardson explains that “it required an increasing amount of energy to achieve basic integration between our business applications and our Novell environment. And there were some features we just couldn’t take advantage of at all.” Managers and sales staff also experienced challenges in synchronizing information from Novell GroupWise with their personal digital assistants. “With some effort, a basic level of synchronization was achieved. But we knew a higher degree of functionality was available,” says Richardson.
New Belgium also uses a portal solution that presented some integration hurdles. Richardson says, “We have a growing amount of customer and financial data in our databases, and we’ve begun relying on SQL Server Reporting Services to make this data available. While we’ve successfully published some of these reports to Web pages within the portal, the effort required to accomplish this seemed more than what should be necessary.”
Also, offering customized forms within the portal—such as a salary-change approval form used by supervisors to request pay increases for direct reports—required handson, time-consuming involvement from IT. The database administrator from New Belgium’s IT team created the form, and other forms as well, using the Perl programming language. “We have a handful of custom-built forms in our portal,” says Richardson, “and they’re cumbersome to support. To modify a form, a coworker has to call IT, make the request, and wait for the change to be implemented.” For IT support and administration tasks, New Belgium uses a third-party solution that also had limitations in integrating with Novell, resulting in the IT team using only half of the product’s capabilities. Richardson adds, “New Belgium is in the business of making and selling beer. Spending more and more time getting our systems to work together was starting to take away from enabling desired business outcomes.”
In order to overcome these challenges, Richardson says, “The company needed an IT infrastructure to support an expanding business application environment that was integrated and robust enough to drive decisions in a timely fashion.”
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