Ölgerðin adopted exMon to minimise the costs associated with manually overseeing and maintaining the integrity of huge volumes of data transactions, within sales, inventory, production and financial departments.

Established in 1913, Ölgerðin has far outpaced its humble beginnings as a brewery to become one of the largest food and beverage suppliers to Iceland’s retail sector. The company now has 315 employees to oversee its operations and in 2020, annual revenue exceeded 148 million USD.

“Each day at Ölgerðin includes thousands of transactions – sales, inventory, production, financial – within our systems. In addition to each of those transactions, we also need to account for tens of thousands of moving variables like discounts, number of items, and production amounts, to name a few.”

– Óskar Ingi Magnússon, Director of Financial Planning and Analysis, Ölgerðin

Magnússon was charged with finding a way to maintain the integrity of Ölgerðin’s enterprise data, which includes tracking shifting inventories, variable production costs, and complex customer billing and discounts across various systems. More importantly, Ölgerðin needed a solution that was as efficient as it was effective.

The team at Ölgerðin turned to exMon’s data quality management platform, and master and reference data management tool. Their goal was to minimize the costs and waste associated with unnecessary mistakes. In addition, the company also wanted a way to support its business goals by ensuring its data was accurate, timely and accessible.

Explaining what drove the decision, Magnússon says, “At Ölgerðin our leadership has always leveraged and supported data-driven decision making, and exMon fits well into that mindset because it exposes valuable data that would otherwise never see the light of day.”

Since implementing exMon, Ölgerðin has found multiple use cases for the platform and experienced significant advantages across both its operation centres and sales and marketing initiatives.

• Automating inventory: inaccurate inventory data was resulting in lost revenue due to the use of manual processes – a series of checks were implemented via exMon that trigger alerts when stocks are low
• Monitoring production costs: small errors in production data were costly, especially if not caught early enough – exMon enabled the team to monitor production variables and automatically alert stakeholders if the cost price varied more than 10% from one batch to the next
• Vetting customer discounts: unchecked discounts can be costly, particularly if a customer is being under-billed – Ölgerðin used exMon to centralize all customer agreements and monitor billing, all inconsistencies are now corrected in either direction before an invoice is sent to the customer
• Supporting marketing initiatives: increasing business volume meant that some individual sales and marketing support accounts were not monitored at the macros level – with exMon, the company implemented a flag system, which alerted sales managers when one of their accounts has reached the 90% threshold of their annual marketing support allotment

Ölgerðin’s is only just beginning to explore the potential of exMon, and the team plans to use exMon to implement a series of financial checks in cooperation with external auditors, review crucial workflows within Ölgerðin’s ERP and Warehouse systems, and optimize internal workflows across the enterprise.