The Palmetto Brewing Company is a microbrewery located in Charleston, SC that produces four year-round beers and a mixture of experimental craft beers with limited availability. Recently, the local market has seen a flood of new craft beers requiring the brewery to seek innovative tools to remain competitive and ensure customer demand is met. Due to the unique nature of the craft brewing business, the failure in meeting customer demand due to limited production capability will impair the brewery’s market image and sales. Therefore, this project will determine inefficiencies in Palmetto’s production schedule to prevent lost sales for their four popular year-round beers.
Purpose and Objectives:
The purpose of this project is to evaluate Palmetto Brewing Company’s production process and develop tools to systematically forecast customer demand and optimize the production schedule while ensuring that the company remains competitive in a nearly saturated craft beer market. This will additionally allow Palmetto Brewery to minimize excess inventory and costs, provide the freshest …show more content…
The optimization model produced a theoretical weekly production schedule that may be used over the 6 month planning horizon.
Conclusions/Recommendations:
Palmetto Brewery would greatly benefit from marketing research to more accurately develop historical customer demand for use in the demand forecasting models. It is also recommend that Palmetto Brewery utilize the optimization model to schedule their production of the four year-round beers to ensure that customer demand is always met. The model also allows Palmetto to designate certain fermenters for the four beers so that excess capacity can be used for the objective of developing new flavors that craft beer enthusiasts may