Andytown Coffee Roasters is a San Francisco-based roastery with three retail locations, a strong online presence that has only grown since COVID-19, and progressive values. Andytown is a thriving business slated for continued growth and popularity in the Bay Area and beyond.

The challenge, of course, to handling new growth is that Andytown lacked a strategy for efficiently organizing and managing production runs. And with orders coming in from multiple sales channels, Andytown saw no end in sight to the increasing complexity of quickly receiving orders and planning new production cycles accordingly.

Andytown needed a new strategy, fast. So, they turned to RoasterTools to help them manage their orders quickly and accurately, handle a higher volume, and most importantly, prepare to scale.

The Challenges: Wasting Time & Making Mistakes on Smartsheets

Before turning to RoasterTools, Andytown relied on Smartsheets – a dynamic spreadsheet tool for project management–to handle the process of receiving orders and planning production.

While Smartsheets is a decent tool for organizing information, it lacks the functionality needed for the unique needs of a coffee roastery: receiving orders from wholesale and retail customers, slotting those orders into production cycles with quick turnarounds, and ensuring that orders have been delivered, completed, and paid for.

As a result, Andytown’s team was spending upwards of two hours a day–sometimes three–on managing production cycles, which involved three different spreadsheets for receiving orders, determining order size, and organizing customer data.

“It was a nightmare, honestly,” says Corey Turner, the Director of Coffee Production at Andytown. “We were getting a ton of email orders from customers, a ton of phone calls, and a ton of text message orders. We really needed a way to organize, because we were growing.”

Not only was this system consuming time, it was resulting in human errors from relying on repeat manual tasks.

“It was easy for management to make a miscalculation when organizing the production runs for the day,” explains Turner. “It was also easy for the production team to make a mistake from translating the spreadsheets to production checklist. Data was being translated three or four times by a human being.”

Turner continues, “There were mistakes all over the place.”

The impact of these kinds of errors? Too much coffee–wasting resources, or too little–resulting in delays on order delivery….not to mention, a downturn in quality and customer satisfaction.

Finally, Andytown was facing the challenge of increasing volume of online wholesale orders, which had spiked since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The bottom line? To maintain quality and run a streamlined, efficient business that could scale, Andytown needed a new solution.

The Solution: A System Overhaul with RoasterTools

RoasterTools is an all-in-one solution for coffee roasteries that allows them to receive orders, manage production, and ensure delivery on one streamlined platform. Eliminating the need to cobble together multiple systems or to rely on “monster” spreadsheets to get the job done, RoasterTools promises to help roasteries like Andytown save time, increase efficiency, and scale.

When Andytown landed on RoasterTools in 2017, they found a tool that would help them meet the unique challenges of running a roastery–receiving orders, planning production, and delivering quick turnaround times without wasting a ton of time on admin (or making errors).

“I don't think that there was anything else quite like it,” says Turner. “It promised to help us organize the production run from start to finish–handling everything from receiving customer orders to sending them out.”

After a trial run with RoasterTools, Andytown decided to stick with the platform–and three years later, has found the tool to be foundational to running their business efficiently.

First, RoasterTools helps Andytown to handle customer orders from their multiple channels, including wholesale online orders, orders from their retail storefronts, and more. All orders are received on a single platform, eliminating complexity and confusion–and reducing the risk of error.

Next, RoasterTools helps Andytown’s team to plan production runs accordingly, generating data about what needs to be roasted, ground, bagged, and shipped–and to whom.

“It also tells us what to fulfill, like what needs to be bagged, which customer it needs to go to, as well as where it needs to go and by what method it needs to be shipped,” explains Turner.

Finally, RoasterTools allows Andytown to sync orders with Quickbooks to easily and accurately generate invoices (although RoasterTools can also be used on its own for accounting and invoicing).

But RoasterTools doesn’t exclusively handle coffee inventory for Andytown; it also helps them to manage other aspects of their business.

“It can handle a lot of other things, besides coffee,” explains Turner. “We can even put merchandise and cleaning supplies through the system.”

In short, RoasterTools delivered on their promise, helping Andytown to clean up and streamline their system for processing orders and additional inventory. But more than that, they helped them save time, deliver higher quality service, and prepare to scale.

The Results: Saving Multiple Hours of Work Per Day + Preparing to Scale

Adopting RoasterTools hasn’t just made planning production cycles easier and more efficient; it’s helped Andytown save massive amounts of time and labor; reduced user errors; and ultimately, helped them reach their long-term goals.

Saving Time & Labor...and Reducing Mistakes

By creating a single platform that automates planning and calculating for production cycles, RoasterTools helps Andytown to save a significant amount of time and labor on a daily basis.

“It takes two people maybe half an hour every day to seamlessly set production runs,” says Turner. “That’s about one-sixth of the time it used to take.”

Not only that, but RoasterTools helps to create an error-free process–delivering not only higher quality service, but a better working environment for RoasterTools’ team.

“Each customer feels like they're getting a higher level of care, even more so because they're experiencing fewer mistakes,” explains Turner. “RoasterTools is pretty much foolproof. The team used to have to give 100% of their focus every day just to avoid making a mistake...which didn’t work anyway. Now, they can just kind of relax and enjoy their jobs, focusing on the details that lead to a higher-quality product.”

Creating Space to Delegate

As Director of Coffee Production at Andytown, Turner has historically spent quite a bit of time on micro-managing production cycles.

But with RoasterTools, she’s able to step away from the process, delegate production tasks elsewhere, and focus on bigger picture goals.

“I don’t need to touch a thing,” says Turner. “RoasterTools has helped me delegate a ton, and freed me up to oversee the department and focus on other priorities–like scaling the business.”

The best part? RoasterTools allows Andytown to become increasingly efficient over time.

“With RoasterTools, production cycle planning looks a lot different than it did a year ago….and especially two years ago,” says Turner. “We’ve become so much more efficient.”

Making Room to Grow

The bottom line? RoasterTools is helping Andytown to produce more coffee and grow.

“We’re able to produce a lot more,” says Turner. “RoasterTools has helped us to handle new growth–especially during the pandemic.”

“I love everything that RoasterTools can do,” she continues. “It helps us to prioritize and juggle everything we do. Given how far we’ve come with it, I have a lot of confidence that it’s going to just keep getting better.” 

Save Time, Increase Efficiency & Make Room to Scale with RoasterTools

If you’re interested in seeing how RoasterTools might help you save hours of labor a day and create a system to scale, click here for a free trial.