Christine Leggat is a DRAMS Superuser for Inver House Distillers, where she works as Stock Controller at their Airdrie plant. She has been with the company since 2006 and has been working with DRAMS since it was installed in 2012.
Can you tell us how you use DRAMS in your role?
DRAMS is in constant use: I am always using it for checking stock, organising removals, tracking casks coming in from third-party warehouses – basically, anything to do with stock control. Every piece of spirit that moves within the business is captured within DRAMS. We also use it for compliance, blending, EMCS, import and export, and fillings.
What do you like most about your job?
I love the variety of work, and interacting with people from different companies in the industry. It’s a fantastic sector: the work environment, countryside and wildlife – it’s nothing like being stuck in a city office. And of course, there are the spirits themselves…
You were with Inver House before DRAMS. How is life different now?
We used an old AS/400 (green screen) system before DRAMS – I have to be honest: I loved it at the time because I knew it so well. But now we have DRAMS and it’s just so much easier to use. I appreciate the fact that it’s completely transparent – you can see the entire history and it’s simple to track any errors.
With the old system if you found a problem it was hard to trace it back, so balancing the books could be difficult. With DRAMS that’s never the case because you can track everything all the way through the system.
What’s the most useful part of DRAMS for you?
For me it is the simplicity and integration: being able to extract all the stock information into Excel so it can be filtered and manipulated for presenting to different companies, or being able to put W1 out on to a mail merge – I can print documents off and submit them so easily.
What’s your view of the DRAMS User Group and customer community?
This is a collaborative industry: there are always stock deals going on, and we tend to help one another out. The User Group helps here because it is a great way to meet people doing similar work in other companies: it’s useful to realise that others have similar challenges and to share hints and tips. It’s also good to touch base with people you know from the industry – putting faces to names of those you normally deal with by email and phone – it all helps to build a better relationship.
To learn more about how you could become a DRAMS Super User and the various other DRAMS Training courses we have on offer, visit our Services Catalogue here.
