In the process of reexamining their information systems, the Brasseurs du Nord have chosen to acquire for 2016 several modules of the Companion® Suite, from CIS Group. These applications have long been recognized in the brewing industry: the three major breweries rely on them, joined by a regularly growing number of other breweries and distributors – just since 2010, a dozen of them have adopted the Companion® Suite.

The implementation project, quite sizeable, involves some twenty delivery persons, and as many representatives. The former will find in the Companion Route module the adequate tool to quickly record the quantities delivered or returned, print invoices on-site, and perform the electronic capture of signatures. Added to that are functions allowing them to collect payments, conduct surveys, and take pictures, among other things, and a major advantage of course is virtual filing, which supplants the traditional management of paper documents.

The devices selected are the Intermec CN70A mobile computers and the Datamax-O’Neil MF4Te mobile printers. Both these brands are offered by Honeywell.

After delivery, mobile personnel may transmit to the office, through remote communication, their transaction data, and, from there, the data is automatically uploaded to the accounting application SAP Business One, also being implemented. The Companion® applications are certified by SAP for integration with Business One. Indeed, CIS Group and the Montreal company Forgestik – integrator of SAP solutions – frequently work in close partnership.

As for the twenty or so representatives, the Companion® Rep2 solution will give them instant access, on Microsoft Surface Pro 4 tablets, to all the information required in their work: complex pricing agreements, promotions, free items, sales history, product catalog, etc. Their equipment will be completed with Honeywell Voyager 1602 scanners. Once their orders and merchandising observations are entered, they too will communicate remotely, then the interface to transfer their accounting data will operate to update SAP B1.

For the office, the Suite of applications includes Companion® Office, which handles communications with mobile units and controls the course of their operations. Combined to Office is a telesales module, as well as the Companion Dashboard, which provides a vast array of filters to apply to sales data for sharp analysis, and also allows viewing this data set against budgets, or against comparable years or periods.

About Les Brasseurs du Nord

Les Brasseurs du Nord have been the first, in 1988, to offer a « Rousse » (dark amber-colored) ale in Quebec. The talent and dynamism of the young founders made this enterprise one of the province’s most important microbreweries. Les Brasseurs du Nord have proven their high sense of eco-responsibility in a number of ways: they are using the industry’s standard brown bottle, reusable up to fifteen times over a four-year life cycle; their labels are printed with vegetable inks on paper made from 100% FSC-certified pulp and are more environmentally-friendly than metallic paper labels – which release aluminum in the wastewater from bottle washing. More examples are hybrid vehicles, the use of geothermal and solar energy at the plant, recovery of heat from the vat-cooling system, a system to optimize water use, and many other measures.