Samson & Surrey implements crafted erp to get ready for acquisition

Craft spirits producer Samson & Surrey had the ambitious goal to unite its premium brands in one distillery business management platform to sell the entire portfolio within three to five years. With the help of Crafted ERP, they did it in two. Samson & Surrey was officially acquired in February 2022 by Heaven Hill Brands. Cheers to that!

With six unique brands, Samson & Surrey was using a set of six different QuickBooks files, three barrel management programs and a separate distilling program. It was not only chaotic — it wasn’t conducive to the needs of a company preparing for acquisition.

None of the barrel management systems had any costs attached to them. Neither individual nor consolidated financial statements could be pulled for these brands at any given time.

Furthermore, Samson & Surrey had no cohesive way to track aging and finished products — or the costs associated with them.

An acquisition-proof Platform

The acquisition due diligence process was rigorous. It included pulling historical financial information for each brand and coordinating detailed inventory counts, among many other assets. Accurate, consolidated financial and inventory statements dating back to April 2020 — when Crafted ERP went live — were readily available at a literal “click of a button.”

“Crafted specifically allowed us to get IPO and/or acquisition-ready in the sense that it allowed us to get all of our information into one complete solution and that solution was intentional,” says John Valdes, vice president of planning and operations at Samson & Surrey. “Anyone who came in to acquire us would realize that we have the right controls in place to be a successful organization.”

Streamlining Barrel Management

Tracking all aging barrels with Crafted ERP’s barrel storage features, including a barrel map of a rack/ rick house, is slick. “With a moment’s notice, a barrel report can be run that tells how many barrels there are, what each costs, how old they are, the bill of materials for each barrel and where they’re sitting at any point,” says Vicky Garfield, director of finance and controller at Samson & Surrey, during the acquisition. “We never had this before and it’s where we needed extreme clarity and accuracy in our financial reporting.”

Keeping Costs on Track

Crafted ERP connects the manufacturing of products to the specific costs of each item produced — whether it be finished goods or aging inventory — so all data rolls into one system. With confidence, the system (and its users) can report how projected costs align with actual costs going into each barrel.

Ease of Use

Crafted ERP delivers premium solutions that are extremely user-friendly. “You don’t need a lot of training in order to work Crafted,” John says. “You can intuitively go in there, especially with the search bar, and ask the system what you want it to do and it pops it up for you.”

Enterprise software is not the right fit for every distillery or every portfolio, but for Samson & Surrey, it was imperative to meet their acquisition goal. Doozy Solutions offers a wealth of industry experience.
“The other reason that we chose Crafted was Doozy Solutions, the team that supports Crafted. Both their industry experience and their overall talent and objective to help us get our jobs done effectively was a win-win for us,” John explains. “They help us get whatever we need done; they’re the first to jump in and help us out.”

Whatever type of beverage you produce, working with Doozy and Crafted ERP can bring your financials together to save time, generate accurate reports and prepare for an acquisition or any other type of audit. We understand your business and can integrate it into one unified system, which can be customized as necessary to fit your specific requirements. Give us a shot.