The brewer of Samuel Adams beer wasn’t looking for revolutionary changes in its inventory system. But Boston Beer Company Supply Planning Manager John Meleedy Jr. ’16, ’21MBA was confident that Bryant University’s Global Supply Chain Management students would draft a good plan for addressing some nagging issues with changing products over seasonally and aligning the company’s production schedule and warehousing capacity.
During the 2025-26 academic year, the $2-billion company got a “twofer” from Bryant supply chain students, with a pair of capstone projects producing a seasonal product transition analysis and recommendations for better synching production scheduling and capacity at Boston Beer Co.’s Cincinnati warehouse.
The seasonal team, comprised of Arianna Ugolini ’26, Kylee Hicks ’26, Kai Konstantino ’26, Jackson Shaughnessy ’26, and Sean Palladini ’26 examined the company’s Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) model and wholesaler behavior, using Microsoft Excel and Power BI — a data visualization, database management, and data modeling program — to analyze weekly supply and demand and projected inventory.
Seasonal transitions are “a disruptive period for Boston Beer Co. as they need to start phasing out past seasonal Stock Keeping Units (SKUs) for new season products,” according to the team’s presentation. The examination of the company’s forecasting practices and wholesaler inventory behavior and how they affect inventory discrepancies like stockouts, excess inventory, and overall disruptions found that “many wholesalers were using these forecasts inconsistently,” with some using them as shipment levers and others as depletion forecasts.
“This causes a lot of volatility for Boston Beer Co. and reduces their overall forecast accuracy during these transitions,” the group concluded.
“One of the toughest parts of our business is trying to end a season with no inventory,” says Meleedy. “It's difficult to run everything down to zero, not have any scrap, and keep [customers] in stock as we're going through those seasonal transitions.”
To address the problem, the Bryant team recommended that Boston Beer Co. enhance its current VMI model with “flex fencing,” a time-based forecast control system aimed at controlling last-minute “casual, low-stakes wholesaler changes that currently create the most production disruption.” Other recommendations included implementing a wholesaler forecasting training program and incentive program and creating a scorecard to track wholesaler efficiency.
“Selling beer is hard, because you have to predict how many sales you're going to have far in advance,” explains Management Professor Christopher Roethlein, Ph.D., who served as faculty advisor on the project along with Teresa McCarthy Byrne, Ph.D., associate professor of Marketing and Global Supply Chain Management. “The team came up with a plan to help the company do better at forecasting so they can be more efficient and make more money.”
“Selling beer is hard, because you have to predict how many sales you're going to have far in advance.The team came up with a plan to help the company do better at forecasting so they can be more efficient and make more money.”
Ugolini calls the project a “massive data-analysis learning experience” that addresses a real, immediate area of improvement for Boston Beer Co.
“It was challenging at times because we often lacked complete data or required significant context because of company-specific terminology and data organization systems,” says Ugolini, who graduated in May with a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, with concentrations in Global Supply Chain Management and Applied Analytics. “This pushed us to be resourceful: we would dive in, do our best with what we had, and use our weekly meetings with John as a collaborative launching pad.”
Meleedy says Boston Beer Co. will be going through its next seasonal transition, from summer to Oktoberfest, in the next few weeks. “I’ll be digging back into the report to see how we can use some of those findings in our workflow,” he says.
Seeking balance
The challenge for the Cincinnati team — Hailey Furtado ’26, Liam Hickey ’26, Safiye Iskenderoglu ’26, Rachel Mold ’26, and Tanvi Patel ’26 — was to examine the misalignment between production planning and warehouse capacity in order to allow Boston Beer Co. to store the product they need without having to expand the size of their warehouse.
"That one came as a bit of a challenge from [company founder] Jim Koch himself — trying to reduce our warehouse footprint,” says Meleedy. “For years, we've relied on a third-party warehouse for our Ohio brewing facility, and his vision is to reduce that as much as possible. In theory, you should be able to make the product, put it on the truck, and ship it to the wholesaler. Having a third-party warehouse is just an extra wasted cost.”
Boston Beer Co. recently invested in an Automatic Storage Retrieval System (ASRS) to help improve efficiency in the Cincinnati facility. “The Bryant project looked into how we can better utilize that space and avoid situations where we run out of space and end up shutting the production lines down, which costs us a lot of money,” says Meleedy.
“The Bryant project looked into how we can better utilize that space and avoid situations where we run out of space and end up shutting the production lines down, which costs us a lot of money."
The team concluded that oversized safety buffers were limiting the storage capacity of the facility. Students recommended that Boston Beer Co. recalibrate its minimum/maximum inventory levels to reduce excess inventory and develop an optimization strategy for the ASRS to increase usable capacity.
“This consists of implementing mixed-expiry bay logic to allow same-SKU pallets with different [shelf-life expiration dates] to share bays while maintaining [first-in, first-out] traceability,” the report noted.
The team also suggested introducing a multi-level defragmentation routine to consolidate inventory while prioritizing fast-selling products.
“We’ve talked about potentially adding a different warehousing system … and if that comes to fruition the Bryant work will be important in understanding how well we use the capacity of that system and how can we succeed in a constrained warehouse environment,” Meleedy says.
Roethlein says the Cincinnati group enlisted the help of Ryan Harris ’18 to conduct their analysis, which he says was unusually sophisticated for undergraduate-level students. Harris, a quantitative developer at HarbourVest Partners in Boston, is also an adjunct professor of Marketing at Bryant.
“Our students may find that they don't know how to solve a problem, but they find a way to get the project done by reaching out to people like Ryan. That's a lesson that they'll carry with them into work: you have to admit what you don't know but you still have to find a way to get it done,” says Roethlein.
The Bulldog mindset
The projects demonstrate that there’s always room for improvement, even at a well-known company like Boston Beer Co., Roethlein adds.
“Our students are really eager to prove their worth,” he says. “We give them a mindset that failure is not an option, and we're going to teach you how to ask the right questions. And they get caught up in it and work until they succeed.”
Meleedy, who was a Global Supply Chain Management major as an undergraduate at Bryant, says his own capstone project was the highlight of his time at the university.
“Working with two separate teams from Bryant was quite a bit of work, but it was really rewarding, and I enjoyed giving back to the school and being able to connect with students and help them early on in their careers,” Meleedy says.
“Working with two separate teams from Bryant was quite a bit of work, but it was really rewarding, and I enjoyed giving back to the school and being able to connect with students and help them early on in their careers."
The capstone projects also offers students valuable insight into how companies, like Boston Beer Co., operate, adds Meleedy.
“It's easy to look in from the outside and say, ‘Wow, that place looks like they've got everything buttoned up,’ when behind the scenes there's a lot of people running around fixing stuff and breaking things,” he says. “It was fun to work through those things with students and give them a real sense of what they're going to experience when they graduate and move into their first job roles.”
Ugolini adds that Meleedy taught them that real-world problems do not have simple solutions and require out-of-the-box critical thinking.
“The experience truly pushed our analytical and problem-solving skills to the next level,” Ugolini says.