Ekos is built for brewery businesses. But more than that, it’s built for the people running brewery businesses—so you can spend more time growing and enjoying your business. Most of our customers love using Ekos, but we know some have been hoping for more: better speed, more integrations, more intuitive features, and more powerful management components that turn the software into a core hub of business activity. Our developers were listening, and we’ve been designing the enhancements and software capabilities our users need to thrive.
Today, craft breweries make up at least 13.2% of the beer market across the United States. Staying competitive, growing your business, and ensuring top-tier product quality during ongoing economic turbulence isn’t easy. That’s why our team has spent the past year refining our business management platform to offer features, dashboards, and integrations that provide the most value for modern brewers and craft beer sellers. Keep reading to learn more about the foundational aspects of Ekos’s business management software, how it’s changed, and our core promise to our users. We’re just as excited as you are!
You Asked for More Features—And We Listened
Business management software is a critical aspect of operating a business for any company—virtually all organizations need finance tools, sales forecasts, contract management, and marketing campaign tools. But breweries need a lot more to maximize their business potential: there are distinct tools that make up the ideal brewery tech stack. Tech-enabled product tracking and management are uniquely important for breweries building their brand.
We are constantly evolving, listening to the market, reviewing macro and micro trends, and responding. To create the right workflow and cloud-based environment for comprehensive business insights, we’ve been gathering feedback from our past and current users, industry experts, business owners at the Craft Brewers Conference, and more—to fundamentally enhance our software so it has everything you need and performs how you expect.
All the Tools Breweries Need to Manage Their Business in One Place
Our goal is to continually create and refine a business platform that breweries actively enjoy using, and we introduced the new and improved Ekos at the recent Craft Brewers Conference. Past and present users were excited to explore all the different features, Sales Dashboard functions, comprehensive integrations, and experiencing the improved speed and performance in the system. Users spent more than seven minutes on average just exploring all the different insights and views they could access straight from the dashboard. We think you’ll have just as much fun exploring the possibilities that all of our new and pre-existing functions bring to the table.
Related: How to Start & Manage a Brewery Taproom
Part of our platform evolution is a more powerful, faster business management solution for breweries, and it’s built on these four pillars that are now stronger than ever:
1. Fermentation Analysis and a New Production Planner So You Can Manage Product Quality
Product quality management takes center stage in the new release. Start with fermentation analysis capabilities designed to make it easy to test batches, track data, and compare metrics over time for a more consistent and tasty beverage. The new platform includes:
- Better data reporting: Get endless data that can feed into custom analysis tools and processes so you can control product quality decisions, goals, and metrics
- Easy data visualization: Our user-friendly, intuitive data platform makes it easy to set target metrics and visualize progress toward those goals. Users can also see historical data for fermented batches to track trends, make changes, and identify potential problems.
- Customization capabilities: Don’t sacrifice control for ease of use. In Ekos’s fermentation analysis portal, users get to define measurements, prioritize different metrics, and create the reports or dashboard views they need for any role or project.
The new Production Planner takes brew control multiple steps further with easy workload management tools. Users can monitor brewhouse capability, organize brew schedules with drag-and-drop tools to maximize efficiency and predictability, and fine-tune scheduling over time. It offers easier and more user-friendly production control than any other software on the market.
Data is integral to creating high-quality and consistent brews season after season. Being able to easily and quickly gather, manage, and communicate data across your teams, from the head brewer to the CEO, makes this journey easier and more efficient. You can also simplify audits, quality control efforts, and safety compliance checks without slowing down your business.
2. The Inventory Integrations, Reports, and Management Power You’ve Been Looking For
Turn granular, repetitive inventory tasks into an easier workflow with Ekos. Users can transfer and reorganize inventory in bulk. The new Transfers List page holds all of the details in one place so authorized users on the team can edit transfers, review changes, and ensure inventory goes where it’s needed, whether it’s sending bottled products to different restaurants and retailers or keeping up with in-house inventory needs. Generate accurate TTB reports with a single click—or automate report generation so you don’t even have to click.
Our inventory management tools integrate with Shopify to make logistics management a breeze, no matter where you sell, what locale-specific taxes need to be paid, or where your inventory starts its journey. The Ekos platform also has VIP integration so you can see and share catalogs, inventory levels, depletion data, and more. You can set up alerts, get reports from all of your inventory and distribution channels, and get real-time insights.
Omni-channels sales strategies are crucial for growing or even maintaining your business. With Ekos, users can integrate their online sales, physical retail sites, and distribution channels for maximum efficiency during shipping, when using warehouses, and when planning new batches. There’s less waste, fewer delays, and no surprises.
3. A Sales Dashboard and Order Platform That Makes Sales Enablement, Forecasting, and Region Management Easier Than Ever
Sales enablement is at the heart of every business, and Ekos provides sales enablement tools built just for breweries and craft beverage companies. The Ekos Order Hub does it all so you can convert prospective customers, fulfill their orders, and keep reaching new markets. And when all of your sales channels leverage Ekos, your finished goods inventory automatically sync between all of those channels, saving significant time when used correctly.
First, the hub makes the selling process far more efficient. It automates manual and repetitive tasks so sales reps can focus on sales, not data entry. It also includes tools for growing accounts through cross-selling, upselling, and great account management.
The hub isn’t just for inside sales teams. Distributors and customers can also see real-time inventory levels (but your team stays in the driver’s seat to control how much they see), so they can plan orders, anticipate arrival time, and coordinate complex orders.
Also, our new historical sales dashboard is coming soon. Everyone on your revenue team can see trends, goals, and performance analytics in highly visual arrangements. Whether a salesperson wants to know how their performance is tracking for the quarter or your VP of Sales wants to forecast accurate goals for Q4, the new dashboard is built for insights and decision-making. It’s full of easy-to-use options, charts, and metrics tools so anyone on your team can make the switch to using the full array of features.
Related: New Commerce7 features in Ekos empower wineries to track trends and gain business insights
The Ekos ecosystem is built to help your salespeople be as productive as possible by cutting out unnecessary tasks and automating information updates. It also makes the selling process itself more productive by facilitating bigger, more frequent orders that your distributors and customers can rely on.
4. Accounting Tools and Integrations So Your Finance Team Has a Complete Picture
Every company has a tech stack, but how in sync are all the various platforms? Our clients have told us how important it is to have tools that talk to each other, so they can generate reports that tell the whole story instead of just giving a partial picture. With those needs in mind, we’ve expanded the finance portions of the platform to integrate with Intuit, VIP, Fintech, and revenue generation tools.
When you’re missing financial data for a product line or distribution channel, your team can’t make reliable forecasts or finish up the books each month. Ekos is now designed to interact with data feeds from more major financial softwares so you can act more confidently inside the platform.
Is everyone in your brewery constantly in motion? Don’t let your business software slow things down! Ekos offers more mobile functionality than ever before—including reports, product lists, purchase and inventory receipts, and individual facility views—so you can get work done anywhere—even on your phone. And because we are constantly evolving, expect even more mobile improvements soon.
Keep Your Craft Beverage Business Running Smoothly With a Business Management Solution That’s Constantly Growing
Ekos is proud to offer all of our prospective, current, and past clients these exciting new features. But we’re even more proud to have a development team that keeps your needs and feedback in the spotlight on every product development map—and we will keep listening. Customer feedback is always welcome, and we work hard to constantly refine our platform so everyone has the workflow, integrations, data tools and performance they need to succeed in the growing brewery market. When you’re ready to switch to Ekos or want to see how much more intuitive the tools are than your current brewery business management software, reach out to schedule a demo. We can’t wait to show you what the platform can do!
