[Odoo case study] Heartpia Inc. (craft beer brewing)

Tell us about your company

We are a local brewery in Fukuyama, Hiroshima: we brew craft beer, run the restaurant attached to it, and sell bottled and keg beer wholesale.

Since starting up about five years ago we have grown steadily. Our fruit beers made with citrus from the Seto Inland Sea, and our rose beer, have gone down well and found an audience, mainly locally.

What led you to choose Odoo?

We are a microbrewery, so in the early days we wrote our paperwork out by hand and did invoicing, sales tracking, stock control and the liquor tax ledger entirely in spreadsheets.

As sales grew, though, keeping the paperwork straight became unwieldy: it ate our time and the mistakes began to show.

We felt strongly that we needed one integrated system covering manufacturing through sales, invoicing and the ledgers, but running a small operation meant a small budget, so we looked at open source ERP.

We considered a number of candidates. A brewery like ours has to keep unusual ledgers, such as the liquor tax ledger for excise returns, and covering that needs customisation — so we chose Odoo, which has a wealth of modules and can be customised flexibly.

What changed after you adopted Odoo?

With Odoo we can work across the whole span — sourcing raw materials, production management, stock, sales management and the liquor tax ledger — which is enormously more efficient than the handwritten-paperwork days.

I am the brewer, but I also do the sales, so compressing the time the work takes is a considerable benefit.

How have you found Quartile's service?

The weekly web meetings were a great help. In the early stages I struggled to get to grips with handling the system, but being taught in real time, on top of exchanges by email and task, let me understand Odoo efficiently. And where our own situation called for customisation, they built exactly what we asked for using OCA modules. Quartile handled all of this attentively and we are grateful for it.

What would you like to see improved?

On the brewing side, the other staff have become more proficient, and with production managed in Odoo we can now handle recipes, stock and purchasing alongside the work itself. From here we plan to push on external sales and put our effort into sales and marketing — and when we do, we would like to make more use of Odoo as a sales tool.

Anything else you would like to add

Quartile are not only professionals at implementing Odoo; the depth of their knowledge as ERP consultants is impressive. Thank you for all the care you have taken.