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
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 as well as 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.
According to CFO Thijs Weber, “The implementation of a company-wide ERP solution will help us maximize the return on our production capacity.”
The brewery, along with implementation partner, Quistor FoodQloud, took a phased project approach with the ERP implementation to gradually guide the core users and minimize the stress on 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 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 are able to connect the status of the inventory 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.
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.”
The implementation of Crafted ERP allows Texels to connect all the dots — enabling brewery-wide visibility, agility and scalability, future-proofing this craft brewery with their traditions and product integrity intact.
To learn more about Texels, or perhaps plan a trip, visit its website.
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