Maison Dandoy: Putting the House in the 21st Century

About Maison Dandoy 

Maison Dandoy was established in a small house close to Brussels Grand Place in 1829 and is the oldest biscuiterie in Brussels. The company specializes in the creation of speculoos, which is a type of spiced biscuit traditionally baked for consumption on or before St Nicholas’ day, also celebrated in Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg. The traditional biscuit is handmade in a truly artisanal way. Maison Dandoy has a wide range of biscuits that are produced in a small atelier in Brussels with ingredients that are 100% natural. The company is an authentic Belgian brand having full production in Brussels. It has sustained for seven generations as a family-owned business. 

Learn more about Maison Dandoy at https://maisondandoy.com/ 

A Legacy of Tradition

Beginning in a small house behind the Grand Place of Brussels, today, Maison Dandoy works just as it did 200 years ago. The production of speculoos cookies continues to be 100% natural artisanal craftsmanship. Large speculoos are still produced by hand in the wooden molds that have been used for years. However, it was not just biscuits that were made traditionally. Maison Dandoy’s traditional methods were also used to manage the business. Many production activities such as the warehouse for packaging was managed by employees using pen/paper and by simply viewing the stock. 

Other tools previously used to manage the business included Excel, an independent soft POS, phone/fax, and an accounting software on an internal server, where it was impossible to retrieve data. Due to the various unintegrated methods, there were often problems with stock management and no data previsions or reporting. Maison Dandoy understood it was profitable, but with the accumulation of the shops and channels, it became difficult to track day-to-day business. With the business continuously growing, Maison Dandoy needed a new management system.

The Implementation Journey

After assessing a range of ERP systems, Maison Dandoy decided to choose Odoo for several reasons; the value for its price, the possibility of customization, the range of apps available to implement, and the multi-languages, cloud, and mobile features.

Maison Dandoy decided to implement the apps with Odoo partner Niboo because at the beginning of the project, the Maison Dandoy management team was small, and it was not possible for them to self-manage such a large project.

The implementation journey began in 2017 and was divided into three parts. In 2017,  Maison Dandoy implemented the following apps; CRM, Sales, E-Shop and Accounting. In 2018, the manufacturing app was implemented. Since its implementation, all artisanal processes have been implemented into Odoo. This was a big challenge, as some of the employees in Maison Dandoy were working for over fourteen years under the previous methods. The most important implementation occurred in 2019 within retail through the PoS app. The PoS app is one of the key features why Maison Dandoy chose Odoo. Every transaction made is directly integrated with the Accounting app. Before implementing the PoS app, Maison Dandoy spent a lot of time re-encoding daily sales transactions for each shop. Since implementing Odoo, Maison Dandoy has significantly saved time. 

Putting the House in the 21st Century

Since implementing Odoo, Maison Dandoy now has complete traceability. Every product produced and sold is now traceable thanks to Odoo. One of the key features is the recording of retail transactions is integrable to accounting. This has won Maison Dandoy a lot of time as they no longer need to check the daily sales transactions of each shop. 

Odoo has transformed Maison Dandoy at a 360° degree angle. The next step is to migrate to version 13 of the software.  Employees have found the apps easy to use and user-friendly. All data is now centralized, and the company now has better visibility of the operations for every department. Two years ago, they were unable to track yearly production outputs. Today, they are growing exponentially, thanks to Odoo!