The Importance of Accurate Inventory Tracking in a Coffee Roastery:
Accurate inventory tracking is the backbone of any successful coffee roastery production. But it is no easy task.
Every coffee roastery has discrepancies in their green and roasted inventories arising from:
The discrepancies add up over time and grow larger. You need a method to keep on top of it, that doesn’t get in the way of working. There are two ways of doing it, one is to keep track of every little discrepancy as it happens, and the second is to do stock takes at set times, like weighing your overage at the end of the day rather than weighing every batch. With the new features, Beanventory now allows for both ways of working or a combination of the two.
More accurate inventories allow you to make informed decisions and ensure your production schedule for the day can fulfil customer orders promptly. By maintaining precise inventory records, you minimize the risk of overstocking or running out while fulfilling orders.
At Beanventory, we are committed to providing coffee roasteries with intuitive tools that simplify roastery management. Our latest features will help you organise your roastery and stay more accurate on the go. You’ll now be able to make more informed decisions, improve efficiency, and ensure customer satisfaction.
Get ready to take your coffee roastery to new heights with Beanventory!
]]>The solutions roasters have currently are pen and paper notes or spreadsheets. While it can work, to begin with, it takes a lot of time and the possibility of error grows together with the business. The more customers you have the bigger the team you need and the more important the workflow efficiency is. To grow confidently a roastery has to have a great system to release products and fulfill orders.
Most coffee roasters companies focus on product quality that we all cherish. Because of the attention to quality, the business side of things often gets neglected. Coffee roasteries are at their core, food ingredient manufacturing companies. In order to grow as a roastery one cannot overlook the importance of order processing, production and inventory management. The problem is that most software that is built for the food manufacturing sector is too expensive and not coffee specific enough.
Inspired by this realisation we decided to start Bean Mind with the sole mission of helping roasters manage their roasteries.
Bean Mind is started by Rapolas who’s been in the coffee industry for a decade from a barista to cafe owner to a consultant and Enrique a talented software developer, public speaker, author, coach, Harley rider and coffee lover.
Bean Mind was born from the desire to change the status quo of the coffee-roasting software space. Early on, we saw great roast profiling tools but a lack of roastery-specific management software. What most coffee roasters need now, is a tool that helps them to manage their production in a systematic and efficient way.
After working at it since 2022 we are happy to present:
Beanventory - the easy way to manage your coffee roastery. Great design and intuitive interface seamlessly tie in all critical functions to run a roastery.
]]>We have been working hard too. Talking to roasters and developing the tools everyone needs. So much so that we haven’t updated you on where we are and where we’re going. So here it is.
We have built these features:
We’re very excited about the next set of features we are releasing during the next 8 weeks:
Interested in Beanventory?
Three lucky subscribers will get three months of free access 🍀
Send us an email saying ‘I’m in!’, follow us on Instagram and subscribe (below) to our mailing list to enter 🤞🏻
Stop paying for things you don’t need!
Tiered pricing always seems unfair to us, you might only want a few features but you’re made to pay for the whole tier. This is why we got rid of tiers.
Our pricing is simple: a flat monthly subscription of £80 for all current and future Essential features or €90 for Europe and $96 USD for the rest of the world. These are features that you need to run your roastery smoothly. Advanced features will be priced as add-ons so you can pick and choose the ones you need.
We know what you are thinking: my roastery has unique needs that are best catered to by my own manual spreadsheets. But here’s the thing: we are continuously developing the features you need so if you need a unique feature to make your life easier just reach out and we’ll find out a way to cater to your unique needs.
Running a busy schedule and don’t have time to sign up and upload all your data?
We get it, that’s why we offer a concierge service to get your data transferred. Join us for a live demo, send in your data and we’ll do the rest.
Why not use software from people that listen to you?
Not all software is built the same, we exist to make your life easier which means simple intuitive design that gets the job done. Instead of information overload think about seeing what you need, when you need it.
To sign up, simply send us an email and we’ll arrange a call to take things to the next level.
Any questions? Just ask
Let’s solve the coffee industry’s problems together.
]]>One option is to use email or a WhatsApp group for wholesale customers, with specific ordering days. But just think how very manual this process is and it can also lead to an increased number of mistakes and requires a lot of management. Doesn’t sound stress-free at all.
Another solution that many roasters have turned to is using a dedicated eCommerce platform, such as Shopify, to manage their wholesale orders. With a platform like Shopify, roasters can create a wholesale portal on their website where customers can place orders and track their delivery status. This not only streamlines the ordering process for both the roaster and the customer, but it also allows the roaster to easily track inventory and fulfilment. Sounds good, doesn’t it? However, the pro version of Shopify can be expensive, at $2,000 per month including transaction fees. There must be a better way.
A centralised system for managing wholesale orders would bring together or replace entirely all of the various channels through which orders are received, into a single, cohesive platform. This would allow you to easily track and manage your orders, as well as inventory and fulfilment. It would also provide you with a clear view of analytics. The system will be easy to use, as it streamlines the ordering process for you and the customer.
Overall, having a centralised system in place is important for effectively managing your orders in a coffee roastery, as it helps to ensure that orders are fulfilled accurately and on time, while also providing you with the tools and insights you need to run your business efficiently and effectively. The short-term pain of retraining customers to only use one channel for orders will bring massive benefits. Fewer mistakes, less work, more time and peace of mind.
At Bean Mind, we’re dedicated to helping coffee roasters like you manage their roasteries more efficiently and effectively. That’s why we’re developing a centralised system that brings together all of the various channels through which orders are received into a single platform. Our system will not only streamline the ordering process for both you and your customers, but it will also allow you to easily track inventory and fulfilment, access analytics, and offer custom blends and other special features to customers. Plus, we’re committed to making our system easy to use and cost-effective. We can’t wait to bring these features to you and help you manage your wholesale orders with ease.
We can’t wait to show it to you. Stay tuned for updates on the development of our platform.
]]>Not only do we need to recycle the waste products from production, like burlap coffee bags or compost chaff and defects, but we also need to minimise wasted coffee. Roasteries create coffee waste by rejecting roasted coffee from production for multiple reasons:
One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
Just because the coffee is not perfect doesn’t mean it’s not good. Compare it to the pre-ground supermarket bags of coffee that sit there for months. It is still better coffee than average; don’t waste your product and money.
Let’s look at some examples of how to minimise waste:
As long as customers are getting fair value, it helps roasteries manage environmental impact and increases profit margin. It is much better to sell your overage, recover costs and reduce waste than to waste your product.
How do you minimise coffee waste in your roastery?
]]>This decision was made after we looked at our previous name, a Japanese word meaning assistant, with a critical eye. We deemed that using a Japanese word was cultural appropriation, and we didn’t want to do that. It is more honest to call ourselves Bean Mind.
We have already talked about green coffee inventories in the previous post. This is a lot to consider to extract insights and business decisions from multiple moving variables.
It is Bean Mind, because you need to keep your beans on your mind all the time. Not only it’s exhausting, it’s impossible to keep it all in your head. Our goal is to keep it all in one place so you can keep you own mind clear.
]]>Inventory can be as simple as a bucket to keep your roasted beans or as complex as a mix of raw materials and subassemblies used as part of a more extensive manufacturing process.
Just-in-time manufacturing environments consider inventory to be waste. However, inventory plays a crucial role in settings where we suffer from poor cash flow or don’t control lead times and the quality of materials received.
Some of the more important reasons for obtaining and holding inventory are:
To plan your capacity and schedule your production, you need to control how much greens you process at a given time; inventory buffers what you need from what you process.
A supply of greens on hand is protection. You don’t always know how many greens you are likely to need at any given time, but you still need to satisfy customer or production demands on time. If you can monitor your customers’ buying habits, surprises in the fluctuations in the market are held to a minimum.
Inventory protects you from unreliable suppliers (or when a green is scarce and a steady supply is hard to ensure). Whenever possible, unreliable suppliers should be rehabilitated through discussions or replaced.
Rehabilitation can be accomplished through master purchase orders with timed product releases, better verbal and electronic communication between the parties, and so on. This will lower your on-hand inventory needs.
Buying quantities of greens at appropriate times helps avoid the impact of cost inflation.
Contracting to assure a price does not require delivery at the purchase time. Manny suppliers prefer to deliver periodically rather than to ship an entire year’s supply of a particular SKU at one time.
Often bulk discounts are available if you buy in large rather than small quantities.
If you buy a larger quantity of greens less frequently, the ordering costs are less than buying smaller amounts over and over again (the holding cost of the greens, however, will be greater).
To hold down ordering costs and lock in favourable pricing, many larger roasters issue blanket purchase orders coupled with periodic release and receiving dates of the SKUs.
Inventory is divided into raw materials (greens), finished goods (that delicious coffee you sell), and work-in-progress (your roasting efforts).
Your finished product (coffee ready for customer sales) can be used to buffer manufacturing from predictable or unpredictable market demands.
Work-in-progress (WIP) should be kept to a minimum.
From a functional standpoint, you should consider other categories of inventory as well; consumables (things like lightbulbs, towels, paper, tape, etc.), “service, repair, replacement, and spare items” (you need to keep those roasters running after all), buffer (or safety inventory), anticipation stock (for special holiday seasons, etc.) and transit inventory.
Transit inventory highlights the need to understand that your inventory will not only move physically through your system but when and how it shows up in your records.
If, for example, 500kg of greens appeared in your system while they were still en route to you, your record would include them, but your shelf count would be 500kg of greens short.
How could stock show up as part of your inventory before it arrives? The answer depends on when your system of choice recorded the greens as being in your inventory. Did the system record it when the product was bought? When it left your suppliers’ docks? Or was it recorded when it appeared at your warehouse or roastery?
Follow a single item on its path through your roastery to understand the relationship between an item’s real life and system life. Please do this by tracking that particular item’s physical movement through your roastery while noting what is happening to its system life during that same period. You will be able to discover when one of these lives moves ahead of the other and when there are system errors, such as when an item is moved, but no paperwork exists authorising that action.
]]>Recap
Inventory exists within your roastery as both physical items and as items in your records.
There are many reasons for obtaining and holding inventory; it can play various roles within your roastery’s life.
To control and manage the items coming into, through, and out of your roastery, it is essential to understand where an item is physically located at any given time and how that existence is being acknowledged within the system you are using.
There are specific activities they all share:
Depending on how automated that workflow is, each step takes time and proper planning.
For small (and medium) speciality roasters, the reality is quite challenging; orders come in through more channels than I can list and are jotted down on a napkin or spreadsheet; human error is not only possible but a day-to-day reality.
Of course, software exists that solves these issues to some extent (some quite thoroughly). Most providers come from different places, some of them being the golden standard for roast profiling.
There is a need for tools focused exclusively on your coffee production needs.
And so our vision was conceived:
Elevate the coffee roasting business by simplifying production with software.
In this simple message, we codified what we believe to be the essence of what we do; providing software that doesn’t only do the job but is a pleasure to use and eases your mind.
The following posts will take you along on our journey to elevate the production of coffee with software.
Join us on our quest!
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