Environmental and social responsibility are becoming priorities for more and more people across the world. Companies and consumers alike are increasingly looking for answers to all sorts of problems society faces.
German brewer Quartiermeister wanted to do something different, too. Based in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, the brand’s selling point is that it is Germany’s first beer with a purpose. Comprising a limited company and an association, the social enterprise was founded in 2010. Its idea is to donate 10 cents of the price of every liter of beer sold to cultural projects in the local community. Sales of the socially-conscious beer, which is brewed at a number of locations in Germany, have benefited more than 160 projects to date. The business is entirely transparent to its customers, who vote online for the projects they want to see funded. The limited company takes care of procurement, marketing, and sales; the association’s job is to allocate funds to the chosen projects.
More Growth Means More Money for Local Projects
Quartiermeister and SAP first joined forces as part of the SAP One Billion Lives initiative. Through this social entrepreneurship initiative, SAP wants to help solve the world’s biggest social problems by drawing on its people, technology, data, and vast customer and partner ecosystem. All these resources together create a portfolio of lean, sustainable startup ventures to bring about positive change.
Quartiermeister decided to deploy enterprise resource planning (ERP) software to help it expand and run its operations in a more professional way. Growing its business means it can generate more money. The more money it earns, the more community and cultural projects it can fund.
This is why Quartiermeister is looking to expand its operations to all regions of Germany. To achieve its growth ambition, it needs an ERP solution. It also wants its processes to be transparent and more efficient. That would give it more capital and more time to invest in achieving its ultimate goal: business that benefits everyone.
Small and midsize companies in particular have unique needs that require a specific solution. By expanding its local partner ecosystem, and through the SAP Business One and SAP Business ByDesign solutions, SAP is helping the midmarket tap into new opportunities. Moving to the cloud with an ERP solution such as SAP Business One and the support of an implementation partner offers security, scalability, and a smooth transition.
Strong Partner for Tailored Solutions
After they first began working together in 2019, SAP put Quartiermeister in touch with UNIORG, an SAP partner. Together, they devised a plan to find a standard yet scalable SAP solution for Quartiermeister. Here, too, the social enterprise’s values came first. UNIORG has vast project experience and recognized how important it was to understand the customer’s needs and help it meet them. “We are pleased that SAP Business One provides a small social enterprise with a commercial and technology platform that it can use to make its operations more digital and therefore more professional. It gives it the scope to expand further so it can support more community projects and focus on its core idea,” says Frank Hoischen, head of Sales for SAP Business One at UNIORG Group.
SAP Business One was the clear choice. It is ERP software that SAP has tailored to the unique requirements of small and midsize enterprises. It has the main functions these businesses need, and they can add almost any other functionality they want through cloud offerings from SAP and add-ons. SAP Business One can run on premise and in the cloud. UNIORG also built an add-on for breweries that maps their specific processes. Quartiermeister placed its order at the end of January 2020 and the implementation began soon after.
The project got underway in February 2020 – only for it to be brought to a standstill a few weeks later by the pandemic. With the entire hospitality sector closed, revenue nose-dived. In August, the partners began work on the project again. After a test phase, the new software went live in January 2021.
This project shows the strength of working with SAP partners:
- Solutions tailored to the needs and wishes of the customer
- All parties pulling together to respond to unexpected challenges
- Post-go-live support and optimization of processes to help ensure customers get the most out of their investment
The ERP Solution as an Investment in the Future – More Beer for More Good Causes
The project benefited not just the business but the community, too: SAP Business One helped Quartiermeister streamline its processes, making it more efficient. By reducing the workload in this way, the enterprise can free up potential. What is more, management now has more reliable information about its various markets, which it can use to focus on strategic goals and drive its expansion across Germany.
“SAP Business One has enabled us to keep growing, keep doing good, and support more community projects. We now have every confidence that all our business processes are running smoothly behind the scenes,” says David Griedelbach, cofounder and managing director of Quartiermeister – Korrekter Konsum GmbH.
Even though the pandemic is still restricting public life, in implementing an ERP solution Quartiermeister has taken the next step toward digitalization, laying the foundations for future growth and more positive social impact through the sale of beer with a purpose.
Learn more about Quartiermeister.