Significantly faster processing times

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

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

“We wanted to supply restaurants 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 the time, almost everyone advised them against it, recalls the 56-year-old, and it also took around six years until 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 hospitality customers and used to note down the orders here by hand”, says Egger. At first, the orders were only processed after returning to the company. In order to be faster, theOrders also by fax from
sent from a hotel or communicated 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, they were no longer particularly fast in the long run with an ever-growing number of customers.

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 if there had been many difficulties at the beginning. While the employees in the office and in operations were quickly 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.

“That did not go over well with some people”, says Egger, who shows considerable understanding for this: “For example, if 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 a 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 displayed as an image on the picking slips. At the headquarters in Haiming, theCustomer ordersonline in order picking, in which every order on a Touchscreenis displayed. Product by product, everything is processed until the desired quantity for the corresponding customer is reached. Measures the ScaleAt the end, if the value differs from the weight calculated by the ERP system, winweb-food reports an error, since the scales and the 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 a 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.