Radeberger Brews A Smarter Supply Chain

THE CUSTOMER

The Radeberger Group is Germany’s largest brewery group, with a diverse portfolio of nearly 60 beer brands and 15 production sites across the country. Through strategic partnerships and investments, the group serves a range of retail and hospitality channels, both nationally and internationally.

THE PROVIDER

Siemens Digital Logistics provides innovative supply chain management solutions, specializing in digital platforms that optimize logistics and transportation networks. The company offers advanced tools such as the Supply Chain Suite, which enables end-to-end visibility, data integration, and simulation-based planning.

The Radeberger Group turned to the digital twin from Siemens Digital Logistics to better manage the exceptionally complex supply chain for its brand portfolio—a project that also quenched the thirst for higher-quality data in Germany’s largest brewery group.

Radeberger is not only a famous pilsner beloved by beer aficionados the world over—it’s also Germany’s largest brewery group. The Radeberger Group owns nearly 60 different beer brands in Germany and operates 14 facilities for beer and one for alcohol-free beverages. It also distributes global brands such as Guinness from Ireland and beverages from U.S. giant PepsiCo in Germany, for which it also produces.

Additionally, Radeberger holds shares in various specialist beverage wholesalers, including online beverage supplier Flaschenpost, which has been part of the Radeberger Group since 2020.

“We supply every type of food outlet in Germany, from corner stores to major wholesalers,” notes Emil Wagner, digital supply chain manager at the Radeberger Group, highlighting the complexity of their distribution network.

The group also serves numerous other distribution channels and operates a complex international network that transports beverages and handles the return of empty bottles and containers.

The picture is similar in procurement and production. Keeping track of the Radeberger Group’s performance and identifying potential for optimization presents daunting challenges. The Supply Chain Suite from Siemens Digital Logistics helps overcome these challenges.

Digitally Integrated Overview Needed

“We’ve been using digital solutions to manage our supply chain for quite some time,” Wagner explains. “What we lacked, however, was a digitally integrated overview of the entire group’s supply chain, so that we could expand and optimize our capacities.”

That’s why Wagner reached out to Siemens Digital Logistics in 2020 to learn about its Supply Chain Suite (SCS) and how it might help the Radeberger Group.

SCS delivers visibility across a company’s entire supply chain, identifying cross-enterprise, cross-system logistics data and aggregating it according to each customer’s unique needs. This data is then prepped, enriched, and refined so that comparable KPIs appear in a uniform but easily adaptable data model.

The digital twin that emerges provides an ideal launchpad, allowing detailed simulations of various factors affecting production and logistics, and their impact on the supply chain.

“The Supply Chain Suite generates a data model optimized to the needs of each customer,” explains Stefanie Simon, project manager at Siemens Digital Logistics. “The data can then be leveraged to analyze, simulate, and optimize any logistical processes, however complex. All it takes is a few clicks to visualize findings or generate charts, dashboards, and spreadsheets.”

The tool offers a combination of structured data imports from various sources and the ability for unlimited data exports.

“The cloud-based solution offers a user-friendly interface and also makes data available anywhere,” Simon notes. “This makes it possible to continuously reassess business decisions using the latest data and feed the results directly back into operational systems.”

Detailed Testing Phase

The project team at the Radeberger Group phased in the complex software in several stages. “We began with a litmus test of sorts, looking first at just the transportation and distribution logistics to see whether the Supply Chain Suite was powerful enough to map our entire supply chain,” Wagner explains.

This was followed by a proof of concept, fleshing out the model with all movements of goods—from beer production to filling, storage, distribution, and the return of empty bottles and containers.

The result? Yes, the Supply Chain Suite delivers what it promises, according to Radeberger.

Siemens provided Radeberger with a demo version to help them understand the software and its mathematical approach.

“The demo version allowed us to take our time trying everything out,” says Kay Liebsch, head of supply chain project management at the Radeberger Group. “Before, the idea of working with Supply Chain Suite had still been too much of an abstraction.”

Quick Rollout

The use of a digital twin enables Radeberger Group to see detailed simulations of various factors affecting production and logistics, and their impact on the supply chain.

The digital twin made it possible to quickly generate the first studies and models. Just six months after the consultation began, Radeberger used SCS to optimize the entire distribution fleet and plan several truck hubs near a brewery.

The Radeberger Group uses the tool to plan its delivery runs, which by their very nature are constantly changing. The digital twin enables them to scrutinize all downstream effects of each action, examine supply chain capacities and breaking points, and work out every detail—such as how to optimize logistics workflows in brewhouses, tank sites, and storage facilities.

“Supply Chain Suite helped us generally optimize outbound deliveries to our network and reduce the number of runs overall, for example, and we were able to obtain secure analytics to shore up our location planning,” says Wagner.

Radeberger now uses the tool for two standard applications: to examine and analyze detailed issues (tactical analyses) and to obtain an overview of the highly complex supply chain of the brand portfolio (strategic analyses).

The brewery group is now poised to begin rolling out the solution internally. Experts from Siemens Digital Logistics have been conducting in-depth training since fall 2023, providing employees with direct support during implementation.

“There have already been several training sessions on the various modules,” says Fabienne Zachwieja, who is working alongside Kay Liebsch to support the SCS implementation and application. “We also planned a workshop with the core team.”

The aim is to enable the Radeberger team to use the software independently—developing, adapting, and evaluating their own models and generating reliable simulation results.

“The Supply Chain Suite is a powerful tool, which is why we’re still not able to work with it entirely on our own,” Wagner concedes. The plan, however, is for the team to soon be completely autonomous in creating models and adapting them to changing conditions. This should be achievable within about six months.

For the experts at Siemens Digital Logistics, this marks the final stage of a special project. “We’ve had only a few situations in our long experience where we had to adapt a solution to all the brands of a corporate group and their underlying logistics,” says Simon.

With this solution, the Radeberger Group says it is ready to face the challenges of today and tomorrow. “The digital twin gives us the big picture of the entire breadth and depth of our brewery group’s supply chain,” says Wagner. “We can also respond to day-to-day changes and simulate and plan for future changes.”

More Than Putting Out Fires

Future operations are simulated in detailed models that can be fine-tuned at any time. This is exactly what the brewery group was looking for.

“I need to be able to manage the supply chain, not simply put out fires,” says Wagner. “Supply chain disruptions are a recurring and increasingly common problem. So it’s all the more critical that we, as a company, have the capacity to control it.”

Hops, Barley, and Big Data

The Challenge

Volatile production and sales volumes, which are influenced by market fluctuations and raw material availability, create ongoing challenges, while data fragmentation across operations made it difficult for Radeberger to maintain a unified view of logistics performance.

The Solution

Radeberger implemented the Supply Chain Suite (SCS) from Siemens Digital Logistics. It created a digital twin that could model, simulate, and analyze supply chain processes across the entire corporate group. The cloud-based platform enables real-time visibility by aggregating cross-system logistics data, while also allowing for scenario forecasting and continuous performance assessment.

The Results

Radeberger successfully mapped its full end-to-end supply chain. It optimized transportation logistics, reducing the number of delivery runs and increasing efficiency. Data quality and transparency improved, providing the foundation for accurate KPI tracking and better-informed strategic decisions. With the ability to run simulations and visualize outcomes, Radeberger now makes faster, smarter decisions. Secure analytics also support location planning and capacity management efforts.

Next Steps

As simulation results become integrated into daily decision-making, Radeberger aims to establish a resilient, agile, and data-driven supply chain that can not only meet today’s demands but also anticipate tomorrow’s challenges.