AB InBev is seemingly obsessed with numbers. Every year new performance and budget targets are set so all departments are forced to do more with less money and personnel. All managers are under constant pressure to find ways to save. This has negatively impacted employee morale, the physical condition of the facilties, and product quality. Raises are promised to those who meet their targets but they are unreasonable so hardly anyone does. Lots of competition for promotions, which is the only real way to increase salary.
Most of the experienced brewery managers and supervisors left or were forced out due to job eliminations in the 2008 takeover. Replacements are mostly new college hires who practically have to train train themselves and the learning curve is steep. Long hours, weekends working outside your normal department, and rotating shifts are a fact of life. AB once expected their managers to know the jobs of the people they supervised as well as their own and be experts in one or two areas. AB-InBev wants the managers to know just a little bit about everything, This leaves the day to day running of the breweries in the hands of the increasingly disgruntled hourly employees, who have been asked to assume duties formally handled by management with no increase in pay.
InBev has forced a complex and rigid facility management system on all the breweries called VPO, one of over 400 acronyms the company uses. The system generates the metrics that drive all decisions which often appear to be obsure and illogical to lower ranked employees. It can seem that top management is more concerned with running the business than they are with making and marketing beer.
