Dan Boulton

Manager of Operations

Carlton and United Brewery

Graduated 1996

After graduation I completed a two year training program - International Graduate Management Program, run by Scientific Optical Laboratories of Australia (SOLA). The program was a fast-track management program aimed at business students with broad extra-curricular activities, highly flexible, fast learners and looking for international experience. I worked here, the US and Europe in strategic planning. These jobs were a mixture of material optimisation, supply chains and trade offs between service levels, capacity, inventory and manufactured methods. This involved a lot of simulations and model building. With 30,000 products a good forecast enables the manufacturing to operate smoothly and inventories to be kept at lower levels.

After this I moved to Carlton United Breweries (CUB) at head office as part of a team receiving the demand projections from marketing and
providing instructions to CUB's breweries on how much product each needed to supply. Now I am Victorian regional manager of operations planning. My job is to keep much of Australia supplied with its favourite brands of beer. Mathematical modelling ensures that the right amount of beer, in the right sort of packages, goes to all the places that will need it.

Mathematics has been excellent as brain training to enable quick learning. Balancing inventory against service levels, capacity and
manufacturing method is really an optimisation problem and the
Operations Research background allowed me to add some very useful techniques to our work. I use very sophisticated scheduling software which uses the algorithms I learnt at university. People in business are always impressed with the mathematics background. They interpret it as meaning I have done something weighty!