Ethical Organic Coffee Company Moves Their MultiChannel Organization to SAP Business One
Leveraging Softengine’s Tools, Groundworks Coffee Provides B2B Ordering Transparency and Farm-to-Table Supply Chain Visibility
COMPANY PROFILE
- Name: Groundwork Coffee
- Location: North Hollywood, CA
- Industry: Coffee Roasting and Distribution
- Products: Organic Fairly Traded Coffee & Tea
- Website: https://www.groundworkcoffee.com/
- ERP: SAP Business One
- SAP Industry Extension Solution: Softengine Coffee One & B2B Portal
Read the full transcript for the Groundworks Coffee Interview
JEFF CHEAN, CO-FOUNDER: As much a coffee company I sort of think we’re storytellers because every coffee has a story. So you can get flavors from all over, but the people are for me one of the most important ingredients of our recipe. It’s such so moving sometimes to be with them and see how much they’re sacrificing and building into building their farms and these amazing coffees. We want to make sure they get paid right.
EDDY COLA, CEO: Groundwork is committed to the community. We’ve also done projects where we’ve set up a microloan program in Colombia to support women farmers. We’re working with our communities both in origin and locally.
JEFF CHEAN, CO-FOUNDER: When I go to origin one of the things I look for is the beautiful coffees to intercept them before they get mixed in with the rest of the coffees that may be not so beautiful. So this is a coffee that Groundwork might want.
EDDY COLA, CEO: Groundwork coffee is an organic coffee company we’re a multi-channel coffee roaster and cold brew brewing company. We operate in four channels: eCommerce, brick-and-mortar cafes, foodservice restaurants hotels cafes, and grocery. We’ve grown sevenfold in the last eight years and today we have 260 employees.
EVAN DOHRMAN, COO: Being part of Softengine’s program working with Coffee One SAP one of the things we’re working on is a new B2B platform. From a consultant like Softengine, it’s really important that they understand our business not just the system like SAP Business One. In understanding our business they can help us understand how to effectively implement SAP Business One to work specifically for our needs.
JEFF CHEAN, CO-FOUNDER: Being able to you know create the sort of if the information we need to make projections it’s critical, and SAP has got a long way towards helping us do that.
EVAN DOHRMAN, COO: The way we’re enacting traceability not just to the products we create, but also to the materials that we use to package those products. Being able to actually create invoices on the fly and have accurate inventory relative to what’s in our vans has been extremely beneficial for us as a company. Softengine has been helpful in helping us advance the quality of our user experience over time. So not everything we’re doing is just about improving our experience and our quality of work, but also trying to improve that for the customer. To be able to deliver the highest quality coffee available on the entire planet without compromising our values relative to sustainability. We want to invite everybody who loves coffee to come along with us.
“Anyone you tell that you’re going to a new ERP system, they all give you that ‘pained look.’ To think that we’re on a year from when we did discovery to now three months into our live implementation, and all we’re working on is some fine-tuning. Some of these fine-tuning tasks are those little things that make our life so much easier, but this wasn’t what I expected when we went live because people told me so many horror stories. I was thankful for the effort on both Softengine and Baronet teams.”
Bruce Goldsmith, Family Owner, Baronet Coffee,
0The good news is that SAP Business One's Sales Analysis capabilities enabled us to evaluate the results of that campaign and then make adjustments for future promotions. Specifically, we can check the number of transactions, discount levels and net gain or loss per promotion and per location. We have to be very careful with how we spend our precious marketing dollars and the new system gives us the tools to optimize our investment in that area.
Denise Ost, Chief Operating Officer, Goodwill Industries, San Joaquin Valley,
Softengine has been a key contributor to our rollout of SAP Business One. The company's consultants were excellent and helped ensure that we had a successful implementation.
Jason Dugan, CFO, Trudeau Distributing Company,
We decided to find a partner we could put our trust in. Softengine is very experienced and systemized in its approach. We were very confident we’d made the right choice. Small businesses might be intimidated by SAP software. What they don’t realize is that SAP offers solutions designed specifically for small to midsize companies like ours.
Leonard Kang, Operations Manager, Christopher Lena,
We feel like we are in great hands with Softengine and the SAP Business One system they installed. It’s nice to finally put all those unreliable ERP systems and redundant procedures in the rear-view mirror.
Ray Lacorte, VP of Operations, Choice Organic Teas,
The Softengine team was able to tailor SAP Business One to deliver all the traceability Swabplus needed, including all the applicable reports. Softengine enhanced the core system to enable creation of new batch numbers if components don’t already have them and the option of batch-costing. They also added fields for escalation dates, expiration dates and additional inspection data (e.g., who inspected and when), which could be incorporated into each Certificate of Analysis.
Justin Ku, Administration & Operations Coordinator, Swabplus,
Our experience with Softengine has been extremely positive. Any time we call for assistance, they always assign someone who’s highly professional and gets the job done quickly. Interestingly enough, I’ve become so much more educated about IT-related matters since working with the Softengine team on this project. Every time we need to upgrade the system, they walk me though all the steps to make sure that I completely understand what’s happening, which contributes to the overall success of the upgrade. It’s been a pleasure to work with them.