Production inefficiencies are one of the biggest money drains in a coffee roastery. Everything from manual data entry of orders to unorganized production processes can lead to excess costs and avoidable human errors.
Understanding and implementing lean manufacturing concepts can provide roasteries with benefits such as reduced waste, improved efficiency, better quality control, and customer satisfaction—all of which lead to more revenue in the long run!
Lean manufacturing is “a production method that aims to increase efficiency and reduce waste while maximizing productivity and customer satisfaction.” This ideology has five core principles:
Today, we’re going to focus on the third component of lean manufacturing:
Creating Flow: Finding opportunities to remove barriers, streamline processes, and minimize lead times without hindering value.
Why?
Because this is where the magic of cost savings, quality control, and ultimately, better cash flow, happens.
Tell us if this sounds familiar:
You arrive at the roastery bright and early, ready to roast coffee. But before you can, someone needs to…
All before the roaster can be fired up.
Plus, we can’t forget about the unexpected challenges of the day. Employees calling in sick, wholesale client emergency orders, and green inventory miscalculations can all cause absolute chaos in a roastery. If your roasting production processes aren’t efficient, even the smallest hiccup can result in expensive errors across the board.
Every aspect of your roasting processes must flow to promote efficiency and accuracy, from accepting orders from clients to packaging and labeling each bag of coffee.
So, how do you create better flow? You analyze every step of the production process and determine how you can optimize it. Let’s start at the top:
The entire roasting procedure begins with a customer placing an order. First, examine how you accept these orders. If you’re like the majority of roasters, you’re juggling phone calls, text messages, and emails from your wholesale customers.
While this process works when you’ve only got a few clients on your roster, it gets more complicated to manage as your wholesale program grows. This increase in clients and order volume only leads to miscommunication, order errors, and ultimately, dissatisfied customers. Every mistake can lead to a potential loss of revenue or added cost.
And as you grow, your time only becomes more constrained. If you continue to manage orders this way, you will need to hire more people to process the increased volume.
To streamline your ordering system, we recommend that roasters launch a B2B Wholesale Ordering site. Through this website, wholesale clients can easily place orders online, whenever they want and from wherever they may be.
However, having the site is only the first step. To be truly efficient, you need your coffee orders to automatically import into a system where you plan production.
If you use software such as RoasterTools, your wholesale ordering website connects directly to your production planning and inventory management tools for added efficiency. But more on that later…
Another key element of streamlining the ordering process involves creating and sticking to order deadlines.
For wholesale orders, you might require clients to place their orders by Friday at 8:00 am each week. If they meet this deadline, they’ll receive guaranteed delivery or shipping the following Monday. If not, their order is pushed to the next scheduled production and delivery day.
Or, for eCommerce orders, you can create an internal deadline which states that all orders placed before 8:00 am are processed the same day. Those placed after 8:00 am will be processed the following business day.
Setting order deadlines not only keeps your clients on a schedule, but also ensures that your internal processes develop a reliable and predictable flow without unnecessary chaos.
Next, examine your roasting production tasks. How are you calculating the green inventory needs, batch sizes, and production schedule for the day or week ahead?
Chances are, you’re relying on a custom-built spreadsheet to churn out the answers for you once you’ve spent time manually entering in each order. While this approach works for small roasting companies with one or two people, it quickly becomes increasingly complex as you add more wholesale clients, staff to your production team, and coffees in your product lineup. Often you’re dependent on the key person who actually understands the formulas and how it all works together.
If growth is your goal, you will inevitably reach a tipping point where your production calculation and scheduling processes must all work in tandem to create an efficient flow. To that end, we recommend implementing the following to improve production flow:
Optimize Batch Size
We know that “small batch roasting” is a unique selling point for many roasting companies. However, as your business grows, you need to be mindful about how small these batch sizes truly are—otherwise you end up wasting precious time and resources.
The goal is to scale your batch sizes up to make the most of your roasting time while maintaining the high quality your brand is known for.
Roast to Order vs. Roast to Replenish
As roasting companies grow, the “Roast to Order” promise becomes more difficult to adhere to, especially for eCommerce orders. With efficiency and financial growth in mind, many roasters make the switch to a “Roast to Replenish” approach to their roasted inventory.
With the Roast to Replenish strategy, roasters will set a “par level” for each roasted coffee and product size. When roasted inventory hits a designated threshold as orders are fulfilled, roasters will roast more of that coffee to replenish the stock. This inventory is often turned over within a week at most (if not days!) This approach streamlines the fulfillment timeline while allowing roasters to always have enough coffee on hand and maintain freshness. Plus, it takes some of the stress off your production team!
Have you ever considered that the reason your processes are full of bottlenecks is the layout of your roastery?
While you’re beholden to the physical structure of your roasting facility, you have full control over where your equipment, packaging materials, and green coffee inventory are located throughout your business. Think about organizing your workflows and respective equipment like an assembly line, starting with green coffee inventory and ending with order fulfillment.
When restructuring your roasting facility layout, consider the path a coffee takes from start to finish. For instance, your heavy duty scales, scoops, buckets, and other green coffee equipment should be placed near your green coffee storage—not on the other side of the room.
Similarly, the area designated for weighing, filling, packaging, and labeling retail and bulk coffee bags should have everything as close to within arms reach as possible. This can include, but is not limited to:
The goal is to reduce the amount of time you and your team spend running around the roastery to roast and fulfill each order. For roasteries with limited space, racks on wheels and rolling carts can improve efficiency when the same space is used for multiple uses with quick transitions.
Our goal at RoasterTools is to help roasters run a more efficient and profitable roastery. Part of this responsibility includes learning about their existing processes and offering sound advice on how to improve them.
All too often, we hear that roasters are going through the entire production process bag-by-bag for each order. Think about how much time is wasted when you complete the fulfillment process in its entirety for one order, and return to the beginning for the next, and so on.
This is why we highly recommend that roasters aggregate or batch their fulfillment tasks.
If we follow the principles of lean manufacturing, each aspect of the order fulfillment process is dependent on the task before it.
Batching tasks as much as possible—such as weighing and filling all of the house blend coffee for the day before moving onto next steps—speeds up the entire process by eliminating the need to run back-and-forth between production stations throughout the day and repeating steps you’ve already done several times before. Determine your production volume for the day—we know a great tool that can help with that!—and move through each stage of the fulfillment process, completing each task before moving on to the next.
Here’s the catch: even the best software can’t help you if your production processes are not organized.
No amount of advanced technology can remedy poorly planned and executed processes—that’s your responsibility! While software companies like ours are here to help, it’s up to you to make sure that your internal processes are as streamlined as possible. Then, and only then, will software be able to take your roasting business to the next level.
There are three key components to consider when implementing roasting business software as part of an improved production flow:
1. The Technology – Find technology that works to continue a seamless production flow, not hinder it. Software that adds hurdles isn’t an effective use of technology, your time, or your budget. Ideally, find a software solution that can aid in every aspect of your roasting production flow, from accepting orders and payments to packaging and purchasing shipping labels.
2. The People – Who will be using the software? What role do they play in the production process? Will you have multiple people requiring different software access? Consider how each team member will need to use the software to complete their part of the production process accurately and efficiently. Also keep in mind that implementing a software will also require a staff training period.
3. The Process – Before introducing software, review your current workflows. Start by mapping out each step of your production process, from receiving orders to product delivery. Look for bottlenecks where work piles up, redundant steps where information gets entered multiple times, or handoffs between team members that create delays or errors. Some inefficiencies are procedural—like poorly organized workspace layouts—and need operational fixes, not software solutions. Others, like compiling orders or manually calculating production plans on spreadsheets, are prime candidates for software automation. The key is distinguishing between processes that need redesigning versus those that need digitizing.
At the end of the day, roasters must always be open to updating their production processes with the goal of improved efficiency. There are key areas where software can be impactful (such as expediting data entry), but a production team’s workflow is the ultimate predictor of efficiency and effectiveness—and can always be improved.
👉 Need help finding the right coffee business software for your roasting production process? Book a RoasterTools demo and we’ll find the right solution for you!
There’s a reason why we’re adamant about helping roasters achieve an efficient and effective production process. Once your internal processes are operating smoothly and accurately, you’ll find that these benefits start to materialize throughout your business in the form of improved cash flow.
Arguably the biggest benefit to improved production flow is the cost savings. With less human error, product waste, and excessive labor hours, your business can move the needle toward profitability and having cash on hand when needed.
Joe Van Gogh, a roasting company out of Hillsborough, North Carolina, worked to streamline their outdated and unorganized roasting processes while implementing RoasterTools and discovered a massive savings opportunity right away. “We did the math and between every department, we discovered that RoasterTools could save us 10 hours of labor per day,” said Kevin Swenk, Joe Van Gogh’s Director of Coffee.
At the end of the day, better production flow leads to controlled expenses which leads to greater cash flow across your business.
Inefficient roasting processes inevitably lead to excess roasted coffee, old green coffee, and wasted materials between incorrectly labeled bags and wrong order fulfillment.
For instance, have you ever accidentally ground a 5lb bag of coffee for drip when the customer ordered french press? Unless you’ve got another customer on the docket that ordered a ground 5lb bag of that exact coffee, it’s likely wasted product.
All of this waste adds up quickly and becomes an out of control expense. A streamlined production flow works to minimize the errors and inefficiencies that cause waste, restricting expenses to only those required for production.
With defined production flows and the advantages of software assistance, roasters can focus on what matters: roasting quality coffee.
No more worrying if you’re roasting enough to fulfill the day’s orders, or if you forgot a customer’s order in the queue. You can relax and put your attention toward roasting, cupping, and selling great quality coffee.
The changes you make inside your business can have a lasting external effect, in the form of increased customer satisfaction. When your customers can rely on you for an on time and correctly fulfilled delivery/shipment of delicious coffee, they’ll become loyal fans for life.
Plus, when your employees don’t have to stress about double-checking calculations, missing order information, or sprinting to fulfill orders on time, they’ll be on their A-game! This leads to greater employee satisfaction, team camaraderie, and a healthier work environment overall… (and less unnecessary overtime pay to get orders fulfilled accurately and on time!)
Keep in mind, effective production flow doesn’t happen overnight. It is the result of ongoing efforts to enhance efficiency, productivity, and most importantly, profitability throughout your roastery.
RoasterTools’ suite of features can help you achieve your production productivity goals through wholesale ordering portals, production planning features, inventory management dashboards, and so much more. Plus, we take a hands-on approach to helping our customers reorganize their workflows. After all, our software needs to work for you, not against!
Sign up for a free RoasterTools demo and let’s chat about improving your roastery production flow today.
