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Only a few months after its launch, La Ferme, a craft brewery located in the Eastern Townships, was already overwhelmed with order and inventory management. Having evaluated various CRMs and management systems, PivoHub proved to be the only solution capable of adequately synchronising order management with inventory. With PivoHub, not only did La Ferme cut order management time in half, it also benefited from increased visibility, which helped it triple its customer base.
La Ferme was created in 2019 when Jonathan Thibault, an experienced home brewer, decided with his wife, Mara, to buy a farm in Shefford, in the Eastern Townships. Their goal: produce quality beers with locally grown ingredients without synthetic pesticides. For Jonathan and Mara, the vision has never been infinite growth, but rather excellence on a human scale.
In its early days, La Ferme handled order management manually. Every two weeks, the team made about 100 calls to customers to schedule replenishments. This process was not only tedious, it did not allow their best customers to place their orders on their own.
“For our more proactive customers who took the initiative to contact us, it often happened that they ordered products that were out of stock or that they missed out on our new products, either because the last listing was two weeks old, or simply because they hadn’t seen our last communication,” says Jonathan.
Less than a year after the launch of La Ferme, those manual processes that worked well on a small scale were getting in the way of realizing their vision. So Jonathan set out to find a solution that would help reduce the administrative burden of order management and would replace the Excel sheet where he tracked inventory levels.
“We evaluated generic CRMs, but none of them met our needs in terms of order management."
Through PivoHub, La Ferme was able to put its product catalogue online and invite its customers to place orders on their own. Now, new customers discover their profile, see what’s available and place orders independently, without any manual intervention from La Ferme.
(La Ferme products as seen by a retailer on the PivoHub Marketplace)
“Before PivoHub, if we didn’t proactively follow up with retailers, we didn’t get any orders. Now, orders come flying in on their own. "
Clients no longer order items that are out of stock as inventory levels are automatically updated with each order to show, in real-time, the quantities at the warehouse and those reserved for delivery.
To streamline invoice creation, La Ferme now exports its PivoHub purchase orders and imports them into its accounting system to create dozens of invoices at once, saving countless hours of tedious work.
PivoHub helped La Ferme increase its operational efficiency to free up valuable time for other more meaningful activities. “Without PivoHub, it would take us at least twice as long to manage orders,” observes Jonathan.
Now that Jonathan can batch the creation of dozens of invoices at once, he estimates that PivoHub helped him eliminate 90% of the manual work involved in billing.
Beyond the efficiency gains it enjoyed, La Ferme benefited from the increased visibility offered by the PivoHub marketplace, which helped it triple its client list since joining the platform.
"There is a portion of business development that happens on its own, it's magic! Even today, we receive via Pivo at least one request per week from a new customer. It’s a constant flow from all regions. "
For Jonathan, going back to the old way would be inconceivable: “Once you’ve known how easy things can be with PivoHub you really don't want to go back to what it was before. "
