À la Carte meat specialties uses winweb-food for merchandise management and order processing

They dared something more than twenty years ago: Günter Höpperger and Günter Egger, both already active in the meat industry for ten years at the time.

“We wanted to supply the hospitality industry and specialist shops in Tyrol with meat and Tyrolean specialties and place particular emphasis on service and individual customer requests”, recalls Egger, Managing Director and responsible for purchasing, commercial operations management and marketing at À la Carte Fleischspezialitäten GmbH & Co.KG in Haiming in the Upper Inn Valley. At that time, almost everyone had advised them against it, recalls the 56-year-old, and it had also taken around six years before success proved the two of them right. Today, the company generates net annual sales of around seven million euros with just under twenty employees.

But success creates work that over time could hardly be managed by hand anymore: "Our sales staff drive to our restaurant customers and used to write down the orders by hand here", says Egger. At first, the orders were only processed after returning to the company. To be faster, theOrders also by fax from
sent from a hotel or passed on by mobile phone and entered in the office. “In the next step, we then entered the orders on a laptop and sent them by e-mail. But even then we still had to enter everything afterwards in our order processing program in the office,” explains Egger. In this way, with an ever larger number of customers, it was no longer particularly fast in the long run.

Better with winweb-food

Therefore, in 2015 À la Carte decided to take a big step towards 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 the beginning. While the employees in the office and in operations quickly became enthusiastic about the new ERP system, there were still some problems in sales: “Our field sales employees are 40 years old and older”, explains the managing director. Instead of writing everything by hand, the order should now be entered directly on site into a computer system on a tablet.

“Some did not take that well”, says Egger, who certainly shows understanding for this: “If, for example, you are taking orders in a large hotel during the peak winter season, you are not sitting together comfortably, but have to react immediately and write down what the chef calls out to you during the quick check in Storage or in the cold room”, says Egger. In order to be able to note special customer requests more quickly, Winweb therefore implemented the option of writing text on the tablet with a pen, which is shown as an image on the picking slips. At the headquarters in Haiming, the Customer orders online in picking, in which each order on a Touchscreen is displayed. Product by product everything is processed until the desired quantity for the corresponding customer is reached. Measures the Scale at the end a different value than the weight calculated by the ERP system, winweb-food reports an error, as scales and ERP system communicate directly with each other. This is intended to ensure that exactly the ordered quantity is delivered to the individual catering businesses. In addition, À la Carte also has the final check: “The satisfaction of our customers is particularly important to us”, says Egger. “Therefore, before delivery, we always check once again whether the order and the picked goods also match.” An effort that is worthwhile, emphasizes Günter Egger.