Customer Success Story: Texels Brewery
Texels Brewery (or Texelse Bierbrouwerij) was built in a former milk factory in Oudeschild, a Dutch province of North Holland, on the island municipality of Texel. It is the very picture of traditional brewing with its gleaming copper kettles and quaint Old World backdrop. Brewmasters there have been developing their own unique craft beers since 1999 — using their own yeast and capitalizing on Texel’s relatively sunny Netherlands climate for robust barley and wheat yields.
What began with a group of enthusiastic hobby brewers has exploded in just over 20 years into a passionate, professional team lauded with numerous awards for their products. Onward and upward, as they say — to allow for scalable continued growth, the Texels brewery team decided that the time had arrived to implement a new ERP solution, combining traditional craftsmanship with contemporary technology to pave their way into the future.
“With NetSuite + Crafted ERP of Quistor FoodQloud we opt for a future-proof cloud-based business application, specifically tailored for breweries. The goal is to integrate all our processes so we can work more efficiently and get a more comprehensive insight.”
— Thijs Weber, CFO at Texels Brewery
Overcoming challenges & Tightening Operations with Brewery ERP
Texels’ picturesque island locale does present some challenges — about half the beer brewed there is enjoyed by island inhabitants, but roughly the other half must make it to the mainland via ferry. This makes logistical planning and the capability to grow capacity without sacrificing quality absolutely critical to the brewery’s ongoing success. Their dedication to the integrity of their product also makes cutting corners for efficiency an unacceptable proposition.
That being said, Texel’s growth sometimes made it difficult to deliver sufficient inventory with limited capacity. According to CFO Thijs Weber,
“The implementation of a company-wide ERP solution will help us maximize the return on our production capacity.”
Additionally, they used several different systems and Excel sheets to document their information; some matters were still documented with receipts. With this analog, disparate method of tracking data and reporting, it was difficult to get a true sense of brewery production. With beverage management software, they could align the entire data stream within the brewery and gain a comprehensive insight into the operations and finances of the organization as a whole.
Gaining Comprehensive Insight with Brewery Software
The brewery, along with its implementation partner Quistor FoodQloud, took a phased project approach with ERP implementation to gradually guide the core users and minimize the stress of daily functions. The most important objective of the first phase was getting more comprehensive, real-time insight into the flow of goods by means of a balanced stock administration. This applies to procurement, production and sales functions where tracing and costing are easily safeguarded. The product administration was also designed to support the flow of goods and products.
During the second phase of the project, Texels implemented more brewery-specific features of Crafted’s brewery ERP — standard branch-specific components such as excise duty administration, fermentation management and recipe management. Phase two also enabled tank readings with full batch registration, a brewing production log and quality registration.
“We can visualize tanks and the contents in the system. The strong visual aspect makes NetSuite + Crafted ERP utmost intuitive,” says Weber. Once truly comprehensive insight was gained over the flow of goods, Texels turned their focus to “quality first” as a guiding principle for all its business processes. With the NetSuite Quality Assurance (QA) functionality, they can connect the inventory status to individual batches. The Quality Control (QC) option allows action to be planned and executed based on real-time data. In addition to QA and QC, NetSuite + Crafted ERP offers faster tracking and tracing of products and extensive possibilities to register and respond to potential complaints.
Texels strives for an ever-more efficient and rich financial administration, with uniformity as a key performance indicator. In the past, according to Weber, this kind of data was often manually calculated in a “time-consuming, personal and error-prone” process. Crafted ERP eliminates redundant processes and provides a unified perspective that taps into real-time data.
“Think of dynamic financial reports, linked to up-to-date transactions. This gives us real-time insight into business performance,” Weber explains.
Brewery Software Provides Unified, Holistic Perspective
A single, integrated business solution for finance management, procurement, sales, CRM, inventory management, production and quality assurance allows Texels to reduce manual data entries, eliminate redundancies and streamline processes brewery-wide. “We can save a lot of time and minimize the number of errors,” says Weber.
He stated, “With one central system, we can align the entire data stream within the brewery. Efficient control gives us a comprehensive insight and allows us to improve the maneuverability of the organization.”
Texels Brewery’s journey demonstrates how combining traditional craftsmanship with modern technology can ensure sustainable growth without compromising quality. Disparate, siloed systems and hardcopy data keeping hid the full, detailed picture of brewery operations, finances and sales. By implementing Crafted ERP, the brewery gained comprehensive insight into its operations, streamlined processes and improved overall efficiency. As a result, Texels is well-positioned for future expansion while maintaining its commitment to producing exceptional craft beers.
Interested in learning how a brewery ERP solution can benefit your business, contact us today to explore tailored options for your brewery!
