Brewer and drinks distributor Beamish & Crawford is to install enterprise resource planning (ERP) software to manage its customer supply chain better.

The company, which manufactures and distributes brands such as Beamish Stout, Fosters, Miller, Kronenbourg and Carling in Ireland, says the move follows a telesales initiative last year to allow individual branches to take the initiative in reordering stock.

'Our customers traditionally put in one central order for all their branches,' said Dave Dilloughery, IT manager at Beamish & Crawford. 'Last year, we started calling individual stores to get them to initiate an order via head office if their stock allocation had already run out.'

Beamish is using the System21 Aurora product from supplier Geac. It will deliver this proactive function as part of a web-based supply chain system that can also track deliveries and customer stock levels.

Dilloughery says Beamish will bring in web-based integration with customer stock systems once the initial implementation is complete in the third quarter this year.

'The business process mapping functionality will allow us to build new processes in, around extra stock for Christmas for example, without having to modify our software,' he said.