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For winemakers, barrel inventory is a big problem. Because dealers often delay returning empty wine barrels, most winemakers have to store a large number of wine barrels for emergencies. Since each wine barrel costs $150, these safety stocks add a lot of cost to the company. In order to reduce this cost, New Belgium Brewing in Colorado began to use passive UHF RFID tags and asset tracking software to track wine barrels.
New Belgium Brewing produces approximately 500,000 barrels per year, of which the Fat Tire brand is the most well-known. Now, the company uses Fluensee’s AssetTrack software and Confidex’s Gen2 RFID tags to identify wine barrels. When the wine barrels are returned from the dealer to the factory cleaning station, in and out of the filling line, put in the cold room and loaded into the truck, the labels are identified one by one. New Belgium hopes to extend this system to distributors and retailers to achieve faster return of wine barrels and reduction of safety stocks by tracking wine barrels.
“This system has greatly improved the barrel filling rate” said Fluensee Chairman and CEO Tim Harvie. “For brewers and other owners with high-priced, recyclable assets, asset tracking is a big challenge. The only way to reduce the number of barrels required is to increase visibility.”
New Belgium Brewing followed “6 times the standard deviation” and concluded that RFID can improve its internal efficiency. The company did not disclose its ROI calculation method, but Harvie said that New Belgium Brewing can usually recover the full return on investment within 12 months. “New Belgium is our first customer to use 6 times the standard deviation to evaluate the return on investment,” he said.
“Using Fluensee’s AssetTrack solution and RFID technology to help us automate the barrel management process, so that we can understand the location, frequency of use and return speed of the barrel,” Harvie said.
New Belgium Brewing previously used barcodes to track wine barrels, but the barcode system was unable to match the barrels with specific shipping orders and provide filling rates or other detailed data. The new system encodes a unique serial number for each label, which corresponds to all the information of the wine barrel in the system software. The label is pasted on the hoop strip of the wine barrel and does not directly touch the wine barrel. The reading rate is as high as 99%.
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