Brains not bitter about intranet project

Brains, the largest independent brewery in Wales, has awarded a contract to Actuate to supply its intranet reporting needs.

Actuate will supply Brains with an information delivery system which will support links between the company's sales staff and its 120 managed pubs.

Brains IT manager Kevin Roche hopes the system will eventually be rolled out to other areas within the business and to the brewery's 1,500 other customers as the company's core reporting tool.

Initially the system will be used to distribute information from the managed pubs' EPOS systems to the sales department. Roche explained the information can be used in a number of ways, for example to identify slow moving products or to match sales with staffing levels in each pub. This information is sent back to the pubs so they can implement sales or staff incentives.

However, Roche intends the system to eventually become the bedrock of the company's intra and extranets.

He said: "We see this extranet as the key factor in keeping our customers. We had an internet site in the past, but that is not the true way for us, because of the restrictions on selling alcohol over the internet. The extranet is what we are aiming for in the longer term. We are hoping to have it running in the next three years."

Brains' commitment to a company intranet is just part of a wider ranging rationalisation of its infrastructure. The company has migrated its server software from ICL's Unix to Windows over the last five years and brought in SQL as its database platform.