Water, barley, hops— and integration
            

Foreach Brewing is an Amsterdam-based microbrewery that sells a range of small-batch beers in bars, restaurants, specialty shops and online directly to customers. Established in June 2020, it maintains a library of more than a dozen beer recipes and specializes in customized brews for events and celebrations. As of September 2020, it had four people on staff and was selling approximately 1,000 bottles of beer per month.

When the founders of Foreach Brewing decided to turn their hobby into an enterprise, their goal was to spend their time spreading the gospel of beer: its taste, its texture and the art of crafting the perfect small batch. Yet in June 2020, when they went live with their online shop, things didn’t go quite as expected. While they’d invested in a range of apps—Shopify® for online sales, HubSpot® to manage customer relationships and Slack® for internal communications—these apps weren’t well-connected.

The lack of a centralized data flow meant they had to carry out many repetitive tasks manually: counting labels in the warehouse; compiling reports to send to the accountant; repeatedly checking the website of their shipping partner to see if deliveries had reached their customers as intended. Above all, Foreach’s disconnected application landscape meant its founders spent too much time dealing with routine back-office tasks and not enough time focused on growing their business. Foreach’s founders knew they needed a change. But as a small start-up, they didn’t have the means to invest in a full-scale integration platform. Luckily, they decided to partner with serviceshift, an Amsterdam based IT consultancy, which delivered an ideal solution: the Free Forever edition of webMethods.io, Software AG’s powerful cloud-based integration Platform-as-a-Service.

A one-of-a-kind cloud solution

As system integration specialists, serviceshift had worked with several other integration platforms. To serviceshift’s founder and director Stefan Lenke, webMethods.io stood out as the best. Not only was it incredibly easy to use, with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface to design, assemble and deploy workflows for apps, it also came with industry-leading developer tools, an architecture that supported multiple users and a sophisticated application orchestration. This made automating business processes—Foreach’s main aim—exceedingly simple. Best of all, with Software AG’s Free Forever edition, enterprises with fewer than 1,000 transactions per month could access it at no cost—with no time limitation.

“To be able to access the powers of webMethods for free—for an indefinite amount of time—is an incredible asset for a start-up,” Lenke says.

Freeing up time to focus on a passion

After three months in business, Foreach went live with webMethods.io in August—and implementation was swift. Within a day, serviceshift had workflows to Shopify and HubSpot up and running. It quickly brought six more workflows live—with only a day of implementation time each—and together they made a dramatic difference. Today, the applications powering Foreach’s e-commerce platform are seamlessly connected. When a customer places an order, the members of the Foreach team get an instant notification on Slack and can immediately fulfill it. They also know right away if there’s a problem with a shipment or if inventory’s running low. Gone is the time spent in the warehouse counting boxes, constantly checking whether shipments have arrived, or dealing with the grind of financial reports: Those are generated automatically, too.

“The best thing about the solution is the time it saves,” says Kun Liu, co-founder of Foreach Brewing. “That allows us to focus on what we do best: creating delicious brews and finding new customers that are as passionate about beer as we are.”

In the months ahead, there’s more to come: In addition to its online sales to customers, Foreach sells its beers to restaurants, bars and retail shops, and fulfills those orders manually. Until now, Foreach has managed its online and offline inventories separately Utilizing the powers of webMethods.io, it’s now working to integrate data from its offline sales. This will enable the brewery to create a single, centrally managed supply chain that’s far more efficient—and put it on the path toward becoming a truly connected enterprise. With the confidence its applications are operating in sync, it also plans to introduce a range of new products: new recipes, merchandise and the ability to mix and match varieties in one six pack.

As Foreach grows, Liu says, it may eventually reach a point where it’s time for an upgrade to a licensed webMethods.io version. “Once our volumes are where we envision them, we’ll be more than happy to pay for it,” he says. “For now, webMethods.io Free Forever has given us the exact kick-start we needed.”