Dewar's Glasgow facility, the first of the new warehouses to go live, is a warehouse in the original sense of the word: A place to store product for the long-term. Some casks may age for two decades before they are needed for a blend. Learn more about how Dewar's tracks the location of its famous scotch.

Casks are delivered to the warehouse from the distillery where they are unloaded at the receiving area. Six casks fit onto a storage pallet. An operator scans a license plate bar code on the pallet and then scans a bar code on each cask that associates the casks with that pallet in the inventory management system. Casks are loaded onto the pallets by lift trucks with a special attachment adapted for handling the barrels.

At that point, the bulk supply manager informs operators where casks should be stored depending on whether casks will be used for blending soon, or several years in the future. At the discretion of the blender, casks may be stored with other casks that might be used for a particular blend.

Pallets are stored on the floor in pre-marked bays. Each bay can be 11 pallets deep and 7 pallets high. To confirm put-away, the operator scans the pallet label and a label that identifies the specific storage area. That information updates a 3D map of where casks are stored in the facility.

Casks remain in storage until the whisky is required for a blend. The blender chooses the recipe along with the number of liters that is going to be made. The system then prints out a pick list with suggested locations to retrieve all the casks. A pick list, known as a “dumping,” is sent to the operator's scan gun. As the operator scans a cask, the system indicates if he's picking the correct cask. At the end of the operation, the system indicates whether the operator has picked all the casks required for that blend; if there are more casks to be picked, the system suggests storage locations where the needed casks can be found.