Pioneering Real-Time Operational Excellence in Manufacturing

Established in 1903, Qingdao Tsingtao Brewery Co., Ltd. is one of China's pioneering breweries, boasting 60 breweries across the nation with an extensive sales network both domestically and internationally. The brewery produces millions of cans per month and is sold in over 120 countries worldwide, making it the sixth largest in the world. By adding Cloudera as part of its digital transformation journey, Tsingtao Brewery now has real-time data insight, powerful analytics and a foundation for intelligent growth.

Tsingtao Brewery’s digital evolution drives efficiency and market adaptability 

Digital transformation has been core to the company’s growth. In Tsingtao Brewery's Logistics Management Center, it's imperative to showcase the daily sales performance and production plans for an extensive array of beer varieties. The ongoing objective is to identify best-selling beer types in specific regions, identify cities with peak demand over a specific time, and discern consumer preferences for various beer categories. This is a constant goal at Tsingtao Brewery, with a particular emphasis on automating critical data and analytics processes.

The driving force behind this advancement stems from Tsingtao Brewery's digitalization upgrade initiative launched in 2018. In transitioning from a "product-centric" to a "user-centric" approach, Tsingtao Brewery established a smart factory to facilitate personalized customization, capable of processing orders for various bottle designs, beer types, and diverse clientele. They implemented modular labeling machines integrated with the production line management system to enable seamless switching between product types and intelligent packaging. Furthermore, in addition to the production line management system, Tsingtao Brewery introduced an automated three-dimensional warehouse, revolutionizing warehouse logistics and product traceability through intelligent and automated supply chain transformations.

These automated technologies empower Tsingtao Brewery to anticipate market trends and proactively adjust production schedules accordingly. Consequently, Tsingtao Brewery's competitive edge in the market has continued to grow – along with its data volumes.

Overcoming the data challenges of digital transformation 

Digital transformation can be a double-edged sword. While it fulfills an inherent need and serves as the primary impetus for Tsingtao Brewery's exponential growth, it also presents challenges. These challenges encompass scaling, new data silos, lack of unified data standards, issues with data parameters, difficulty in achieving data aggregation, and non-standardized data development and cleaning processes.

Tsingtao Brewery’s data journey with Cloudera 

In 2023, Tsingtao Brewery adopted Cloudera on a private cloud, moving to a flexible data lakehouse architecture. This helps them collect, store, process, and analyze all of their data more efficiently, allowing them to use more data-driven insights to manage their business operations.

Using a data lakehouse architecture means more flexibility for the Brewery, enabling both real-time data and batch data processing. Cloudera’s flexible and comprehensive data management technology has helped them reduce costs and drive efficiency improvements.

After implementing Cloudera, Tsingtao Brewery experienced many benefits, leading to significant economic gains.

1. Real-time data insights and sales reporting: Rapidly meeting ever-changing consumer demands is key to  Tsingtao Brewery's success. With Cloudera, teams can now conduct real-time data analysis for immediate sales insights. Loading data reports now takes seconds, a significant improvement from over 10 minutes in the past.
2. Major gains in efficiency and scalability: Increases in storage capacity and compute performance have made a noticeable impact. Tasks that previously took one or two days to process can now be completed within one hour, marking a significant efficiency boost of several dozen times. With the open data lakehouse architecture’s separation of storage and computing, Tsingtao Brewery can now dynamically adjust capacity as needed, maximizing flexibility and maintainability. This architecture sets the stage for future use cases and capabilities, such as machine learning and AI.
3. A powerful foundation for the future: With Cloudera, Tsingtao Brewery now has a powerful lakehouse architecture. This has enabled them to consolidate, break down data silos, standardize data processes, unify data governance and deliver real-time insight, empowering informed business decisions.

"With Cloudera, not only can we manage real-time streaming data efficiently – we can also process and analyze our data quickly, delivering actionable insights across the company and guiding our future initiatives. This helps facilitate seamless collaboration among various departments - such as procurement, production, logistics, and sales - ultimately bolstering our sales strategy and delivering a more adaptable and convenient service experience to our customers,” said Li Xiang, Project Manager of the Information Department in Tsingtao Brewery.

Now Tsingtao Brewery is actively driving operational efficiency, and rapidly accelerating toward its development and business goals. They continue to work closely with Cloudera, expanding the functionality of their data lakehouse, adding use cases and harnessing the potential of data to drive holistic business success.