Scaling for Growth: How Next Drinks Built a Foundation for Expansion with BatchMaster ERP

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Next Drinks is a contract manufacturer in the food and beverage space, specializing in aseptic filling of PET bottles for fortified milk, fresh juice, UHT juice, and UHT milk. As demand in the ready-to-drink market accelerated, Next Drinks needed a manufacturing platform that could scale production, manage complex batch formulations, and meet rising quality requirements, all at once.

1. Explosive Market Demand

Key Takeaways:

• The ready-to-drink market is expanding rapidly
• Few contract manufacturers in the region can meet current demand
• Both local and international customers were looking to enter the space

What Happened: The biggest challenge facing Next Drinks was growth. A substantial number of both local and international customers were looking to enter the ready-to-drink market, a market expanding rapidly, with far more demand than the region’s limited pool of contract manufacturers could meet.

2. An Underpowered, Homegrown System

Key Takeaways:

• A basic, homegrown system limited the company’s ability to scale
• The existing system was difficult to maintain and expand
• Production needed to increase across bottles per hour, hours per day, and days per week

What Happened: Next Drinks was considering a substantial increase in the number of bottles produced per hour, the number of hours operated per day, and the number of days operated per week to meet growing demand. The company had a relatively basic, homegrown system that was difficult to maintain and expand, and not fully featured enough to meet existing requirements, let alone scale to meet increased demand.

3. Rising Quality and Process Requirements

Key Takeaways:

• Growth required a corresponding increase in quality systems and processes
• Existing capabilities couldn’t support the necessary quality procedures
• Quality management needed to keep pace with production scale

What Happened: The third challenge was increasing quality and system processes needed to support the business. The quality processes and procedures required to operate at the necessary scale were an essential part of the equation that the company’s existing capability couldn’t meet.

The Solution: BatchMaster ERP

Next Drinks identified a clear set of priorities for its next platform: core manufacturing and batch management, supply chain, and stock management. As a business with a small, concentrated customer base rather than a high-volume transactional one, CRM functionality wasn’t a priority, the ability to make and manage batches was essential.

Several factors set BatchMaster apart:

• Proven experience: The business already had experience with the software and knew firsthand that it was stable and reliable.
• Complex unit conversions: BatchMaster could handle the conversions necessary for fortified milk production, from thousands of liters of milk down to a couple hundred grams of an ingredient like vitamin D3, bringing together materials at vastly different scales within a single batch.
• Food industry fit: The system was proven to handle the particular challenges associated with the food industry.
• Quality management: BatchMaster’s ability to support appropriate quality testing, store metrics within the batch and run, and make that data easy to retrieve was a key differentiator in the decision.

The Results: A Platform Built to Scale

Batch Management at Scale: With core manufacturing and batch management as the foundation, Next Drinks now has a system built to handle the complex, multi-material formulations required for fortified milk, fresh juice, UHT juice, and UHT milk production.

Quality Data Where It’s Needed: Quality testing metrics are now stored directly within the batch and run, for fast, reliable retrieval, a critical capability as quality requirements continue to rise alongside production volume.

A Foundation for Growth: Replacing a homegrown system that was difficult to maintain and couldn’t scale, BatchMaster gives Next Drinks the operational foundation needed to meet accelerating demand in the ready-to-drink market.

Conclusion

Facing rapid growth in the ready-to-drink market, Next Drinks needed a platform that could scale production, manage complex batch formulations, and meet rising quality demands, without the limitations of a homegrown system. BatchMaster’s proven reliability, ability to handle complex unit conversions, and built-in quality management gave Next Drinks the operational foundation to pursue that growth with confidence.