The Swaen is a specialty maltings, one of only a handful in the world. It malts grain, mostly barley but also wheat, rye and oats, into the malt that brewers turn into beer, and it has been doing so since 1906. This year the company marks its 120th anniversary. Sven, who leads the commercial side, clearly relishes where The Swaen sits in the chain.
"We make one of the finest products that exist, with a fantastic end product: beer. Beer is about good times, tied to so many enjoyable things in life. So it's great to be standing at the very start of that." Sven, Commercial lead, The Swaen
The Swaen exports worldwide and wants to go further still, into markets where craft beer is only just arriving, such as India, Thailand and parts of Africa.
Exporting malt worldwide is not a simple supply chain. The company loads in bulk and in bags, ships 20-foot and 40-foot containers around the globe, and can go from a single container to thirty or forty in a matter of days, each one carrying its own stack of documents. Holding all of that together falls to a small customer-service team that lives by the clock. Bertine has managed customer service for five years, keeping products in stock and produced on time so the team can ship them on time, and she boils the job down to three words: accurate, speed and correctness. Alongside her, Nina, 25, handles customer service, exports and administration. Both feel every delay the moment it lands, because the brewers on the other end are waiting to start.
Before Shypple, the work was scattered. The Swaen leaned on a patchwork of forwarders, each strong in one region, none of them joined up.
"In the past it was spread across 5, 6, 7 different forwarders. If I wanted to know something about a shipment, I'd have to go ask one of them. It was very fragmented across emails, phone calls and WhatsApp messages, which made the work unnecessarily complicated." Sven, Commercial lead, The Swaen
With the information spread that thin, things slipped through: orders were occasionally forgotten, exceptions were not always followed up in time. Bertine calls the old setup "a bit of a cozy chaos". A single delay or early arrival meant rebuilding the whole plan at once, a full day on the phone with carriers to make it work for the production team, the warehouse, the transport partner and the customer's deadline all at the same time. The wider market made it sharper still. With congestion in Rotterdam and Antwerp, you could sometimes collect a container the same day but no longer drop one off, and on thin production margins every container forced into storage hurt.
Once they were introduced to Shypple, Bertine and Sven realised their way of working was not scalable. The solution was to put everything in a single window. One reference number now opens the entire shipment: the chat, the documents and the vessel's position. Where Sven once chased individual forwarders and drowned in CCs trying to keep up, the whole team now shares the same view. Even his sales staff abroad, like Csaba in Hungary, can open the documentation and step into the chat when they need to, rather than waiting on him.
For an exporter, the biggest relief is in the paperwork. What used to be assembled document by document now begins from a single entry.
"What we'd normally make four documents for, we now enter just once, and Shypple turns it into four documents. Instead of copying it manually, where a mistake could creep in." Bertine, Customer Service Manager, The Swaen
With the documentation off her plate, Bertine has more time for the customers themselves, and the customers in turn need her less. The Shypple platform has a public page where they can open a link and see exactly where their products are, so the steady stream of "where is my container?" questions have quietened, and with it the panic that used to build as a delivery date drew closer.
What the team keeps returning to is not really a feature. It is the feeling that Shypple is in the room with them.
"Working with the Shypple team feels really good, very close. Through the chat we're in contact very quickly, and when there's a problem, they call us. Sometimes it feels as if they're sitting right next to us, in the same building." Bertine, Customer Service Manager, The Swaen
That closeness shows most when a shipment is at risk. Bertine remembers a delay that left loaded containers with nowhere to go, no quay slot and no storage in reach. Rather than leave her to untangle it alone, Shypple started weighing the options with her, whether to reroute via Rotterdam or find another ship, so the cargo still reached the port quickly and avoided steep storage costs. Nina saw the same speed when a booking was rolled at the last minute and she was called straight away, in time to act before it turned into unexpected cost. Asked to sum the whole thing up, she needs only three words.
"If I had to sum up Shypple in three words: efficient, fast, and easy." Nina, Customer Service, The Swaen
