Significantly faster processing times

À la Carte Fleischspezialitäten uses winweb-food for inventory management and order processing

They took a bold step more than twenty years ago: Günter Höpperger and Günter Egger, both of whom had already been working in the meat industry for ten years at the time.

“We wanted to supply the food service industry and specialist retailers in Tyrol with meat and Tyrolean specialities while placing particular emphasis on service and individual customer requirements”, recalls Egger, Managing Director and responsible for purchasing, commercial management and marketing at À la Carte Fleischspezialitäten GmbH & Co.KG in Haiming in the Upper Inn Valley. Almost everyone advised them against it at the time, recalls the 56-year-old, and it took around six years for their success to prove them both right. Today the company has just under twenty employees and generates annual net sales of around seven million euros.

But success creates work that became almost impossible to manage by hand over time: „Our sales representatives visit our food service customers and used to write down the orders by hand“, says Egger. Initially the orders were not processed until they returned to the company. To speed things up, the orders were sometimes also faxed from
a hotel or relayed by mobile phone and entered at the office. „The next step was to enter the orders on a laptop and send them by email. But even then we still had to enter everything into our order processing software at the office afterwards“, Egger explains. In the long run this was no longer a particularly fast way to handle an ever-growing number of customers.

Better with winweb-food

That is why À la Carte decided in 2015 to take a major step toward winweb-food, the industry-specific ERP software for the meat industry: “A decision we do not regret”, says Günter Egger, even though there were many difficulties at first. While the employees in the office and in production quickly embraced the new ERP system, there were some problems in sales: “Our field sales representatives are 40 years old or older”, explains the managing director. Instead of writing everything by hand, orders now had to be entered directly into a computer system on a tablet while on site.

“That did not go down well with some people,” says Egger, who fully understands their reaction: “For example, when taking orders at a large hotel during the peak winter season, there is no time to sit together in comfort; you have to respond immediately and write down what the chef calls out during a quick walk-through of the warehouse or cold store,” says Egger. To make it quicker to note special customer requests, Winweb therefore implemented an option for writing text on the tablet with a stylus, which is reproduced as an image on the picking slips. At the headquarters in Haiming, the customer orders arrive online in the picking department, where each order is displayed on a touchscreen and processed product by product until the required quantity has been picked for the respective customer. If the scale ultimately shows a different value from the weight calculated by the ERP system, winweb-food reports an error, as the scale and ERP system communicate directly with each other. This is intended to ensure that each catering business receives exactly the quantity it ordered. À la Carte also carries out a final check: “Our customers’ satisfaction is particularly important to us,” says Egger. “That is why we always check once more before delivery that the order matches the goods picked.” An effort that is worthwhile, Günter Egger emphasizes.