Lion Brewery: Adding spirits to beer, reducing costs, and enhancing planning with Google Cloud
Established a cloud infrastructure that can reduce TCO by 30% over three years with Google Cloud
Positioned to improve demand accuracy by 10 percentage points with AI through Google Cloud
Improved the insights provided in dashboards with BigQuery and Looker Studio Pro
Positioned the business to use AI to enhance demand planning and maintenance
Supported the business’s move to add spirits to its product portfolio
Lion Brewery chose Google Cloud to gain a scalable, high-performing cloud infrastructure for its SAP system and data analysis tools. This helped Lion Brewery to expand into new markets and operate more flexibly, using AI to improve performance.
Lion Brewery chose Google Cloud to gain a scalable, high-performing cloud infrastructure for its SAP system and data analysis tools. This helped Lion Brewery to expand into new markets and operate more flexibly, using AI to improve performance.
By moving to Google Cloud, we could leverage powerful data analytics and AI over the long term to make decisions based on rich, whole-of-business data extracted from a wide range of sources.
Sampath Perumbuli
Chief Information Officer, Lion Brewery
Beer has a rich history in Sri Lanka and Lion Brewery has dominated the market for over a century with beverages such as Lion Lager and Lion Stout. Driven to provide the best products to consumers at an affordable price, the business has over 400 employees and a manufacturing plant in Biyagama. Lion Brewery’s reach extends far beyond its home country, with a global expansion strategy and presence in 18 markets across North America, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.
Because Sri Lanka’s beer market is highly regulated with tight restrictions on advertising, marketing, and branding, Lion Brewery relies on a deep understanding of consumers’ preferences and behaviors to sustain share in its home market.
It also makes data capture, storage, and analysis—combined with a willingness to explore cloud, AI, and other fast-developing technologies to drive efficiencies and generate opportunities—crucial to the organization’s success and growth ambitions. These include complementing its existing portfolio of beer brands with adjacent products.
Lion Brewery’s technology-driven approach is also reflected in its investment in state-of-the-art machinery and extensive automation, which means only 30 team members are needed to operate its brewery. The backbone of Lion Brewery’s operations is an SAP system that comprises up to 75% of its application portfolio and enables the business to perform tasks ranging from raw material orders to product dispatch and confirmation.
Lion Brewery had relied on a traditional cloud provider to run its key workloads, but saw an opportunity with Google Cloud to transform its data analytics capabilities. “Individuals within our business were extracting data into separate spreadsheets and undertaking analysis in isolation from our SAP ERP system and other applications,” says Sampath Perumbuli, Chief Information Officer, Lion Brewery. “By moving to Google Cloud, we could leverage powerful data analytics and AI over the long term to make decisions based on rich, whole-of-business data extracted from a wide range of sources.”
Clear technical superiority and flexibility prompt Google Cloud selection
The business has opted to deploy a BigQuery analytics warehouse to house data from SAP and its sales and production information systems, with Looker Studio Pro used to convert the analysis outcomes into reports and graphs.
Google Cloud could also provide fast access to SAP-certified virtual machines to meet the scalability and flexibility requirements of Lion Brewery’s SAP enterprise resource planning system. “This would enable us to migrate from an existing virtual machine to a higher-capacity machine within a day or two when we needed additional power, whereas some other cloud providers required weeks or months to make more powerful machines available,” says Perumbuli. “More broadly, we needed a solution that could scale quickly as we bring further automation and process efficiencies into our business to support our planned move into spirits manufacturing.”
We developed the new campus-style architecture in cooperation with the NCINGA team, and Google Cloud validated our blueprint. We are now preparing to move to the latest version of SAP to access the functionality we need to support our ambitious growth plans.
Sampath Perumbuli
Chief Information Officer, Lion Brewery
Google Cloud’s networking connectivity and infrastructure would also minimize the latency that could compromise the performance of Lion Brewery’s applications, and ensure rapid disaster recovery if the system experienced an issue.
Lion Brewery also identified that Google Cloud applications and services could support its plans to eradicate paper and improve the responsiveness of team members through a move to full digitization by 2026.
The organization turned to Singapore-based Google Cloud Partner and managed IT and digital services business NCINGA to undertake the deployment. “We are one of the first cloud-to-cloud migrations in Sri Lanka, and the task was complicated by the fact we had a lot of unsupported legacy applications running with our SAP system,” explains Perumbuli. “Working closely with my team and Google Cloud experts, NCINGA successfully managed the migration and associated security, application behavior, and user experience issues, which needed to be carefully managed and properly architected. I would give them five stars for their performance.”
The two-month project entailed eliminating single points of failure that increased the risk of serious outages of the business-critical SAP system. “We developed the new campus-style architecture in cooperation with the NCINGA team, and Google Cloud validated our blueprint,” says Perumbuli. “We are now preparing to move to the latest version of SAP to access the functionality we need to support our ambitious growth plans.”
Targeting a 30% reduction in TCO over three years
With Google Cloud, we will no longer be just a beer company any more. We have the scalable, reliable, high-performing architecture we need to move seamlessly into other verticals and realize our potential as a business.
Sampath Perumbuli
Chief Information Officer, Lion Brewery
With the migration completed, Lion Brewery is targeting a 30% reduction in TCO over three years, based largely on the improvements to its virtual environment. The business also plans to increase the number of off-the-shelf dashboards it uses to track performance to 35, with each dashboard providing rich insights into various elements of the operation.
With BigQuery, Lion Brewery plans to transition from a model that required its IT team to spend considerable time developing dashboards and understanding and running queries on behalf of users for reporting purposes. Now, the business plans to give users, including business champions from individual departments, direct access to datasets to develop their own dashboards and reports.
Lion Brewery has also identified a range of opportunities using Google Cloud AI and machine learning services. “The biggest problem for us is how to predict demand due to the volatility of weather, market conditions, and geopolitics,” explains Perumbuli. “We need good demand planning capabilities, and Google Cloud can provide that through its rich AI tools. If we can improve our demand accuracy by another 10 percentage points, as we plan, we would effectively contribute another 0.5 million hectolitres of capacity per year.”
The business is also poised to reduce its engineering costs by using predictive analytics to fine-tune maintenance schedules and minimize unplanned downtime. “All the machines in our brewery are IoT-ready, so when we integrate them with Google Cloud AI and machine learning services, we’ll be able to implement a model that enables our engineers to plan maintenance in advance,” says Perumbuli..
“With Google Cloud, we will no longer be just a beer company any more,” he concluded. “We have the scalable, reliable, high-performing architecture we need to move seamlessly into other verticals and realize our potential as a business.”
Founded in 1881, Lion Brewery is the market leader in Sri Lanka and has extensive international operations. The brewery is a fully automated, state-of-the-art manufacturing facility catering to both domestic and export markets with its portfolio of award-winning Lion and globally acclaimed Carlsberg brands.
Industry: Manufacturing
Location: Sri Lanka
Products: Google Cloud, BigQuery, Looker Studio Pro
About Google Cloud Partner- NCINGA
Based in Colombo, Sri Lanka, NCINGA provides technology solutions that include data and AI, cloud, cybersecurity, managed services and application services to clients in industries such as banking and finance, manufacturing, and telecommunications.
