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Industry-specific ERP system simplifies daily routines for cheese manufacturer

For around 25 years, Käserebellen GmbH in Upper Bavaria has been working with Winweb's proven ERP system. Over the years, increasingly advanced winweb-food functions have been used for the production and distribution of both new creations and tried-and-tested cheese varieties. The industry-specific software is used in various areas of the company.

The “Köhse” is the latest creation from Käserebellen. Even Pumuckl would eat it, although he normally turns up his nose at cheese. And so the little kobold created by Ellis Kaut adorns the company’s carrot cheese. “Retailers asked for a product specifically for children,” explains Matthias Köpf, Head of Sales and Marketing, who needed no further encouragement. “So we took carrots and cheese and used them to invent Köhse.”

It is no wonder that Köpf listens to retailers, as an impressive 37 percent, nearly 1,700 tonnes of cheese, goes to this sector each year. The wholesale sector receives approximately 1,000 tonnes. Its own stores and franchise outlets receive around 15 percent of the total volume of cheese, which is roughly equivalent to the quantity exported to specialist retailers and destinations worldwide. Around 230 tonnes per year are also shipped to private customers and nearly 240 tonnes go to market traders, restaurants and hotels.

To make this possible around 500 farmers from Vorarlberg, Tyrol and the Allgäu region supply around 50 million litres of fresh hay milk each year to the company’s three cheese dairies in Vorarlberg and Tyrol. Approximately 15,000 litres of milk are used every day to produce 240 wheels of cheese weighing six kilograms, which are transported for maturation, refinement and further processing to Steingaden in Upper Bavaria, where the administrative headquarters of Käserebellen are also located.

And this is where the industry-specific software from Winweb Informationstechnologie GmbH, based in Aldenhoven near Aachen, comes into play. Goods received in Steingaden are recorded in the winweb-food ERP system in order to trace the batches seamlessly. At the same time, quality assurance inspection plans are consulted: Are the trucks clean? Is the temperature of the delivered cheese wheels correct? And is the quality as expected? The ERP system is used to perform and document the inspections. It reports errors if something is not right.

The cheese wheels are washed and turned in the maturation warehouse in Steingaden. „A fully automated system complete with a robot handles this for us“, explains plant and IT manager Tino Winterhalter. Up to 200,000 wheels of semi-hard and hard cheese can be regularly cared for in this way. Once the cheese is mature enough for further processing, it is refined with herbs and spices to create 60 different varieties. The exact blends are also stored in winweb-food as recipes and posted to each cheese variety in the ERP system. Once the cheese is ready to eat, the wheels are cut, packaged and labeled fully automatically, and the appropriate SSCC labels are printed. An EDI interface is used to exchange all information about the goods ordered with wholesale customers.

One particularly noteworthy feature is the online shop : “We have more than 100,000 customer addresses in the B2C segment,” says Köpf. To process this large volume, the online shop is connected to winweb-food. New addresses and customer orders are created automatically here. Since these are end customers, the orders are constantly changing. Orders are transferred directly to the system via EDI. “We already process an extremely high volume of documents,” reports Winterhalter. “Being able to create and adjust the price lists via winweb-food makes the work much easier.” A model from Leich und Mehl is used as the price labeler , which can be seamlessly integrated into the winweb-food workflow.

Orders are picked using handheld scanners with touch displays, which report back to the ERP system which pieces of cheese and how many of them are to be shipped to each customer. This reduces errors and ensures faster processing. Once the picker has assembled the ordered items, the best-before date is checked and it is recorded whether the goods are properly packaged. Only then does winweb-food approve the goods for dispatch. The shipping data is transferred automatically from the ERP system to the parcel service provider via a certified interface. The provider sends the parcel labels, which are then printed in winweb-food.

For their own branches and franchise stores, Käserebellen use the Winweb point-of-sale system, which transfers the items and their current prices directly to the Mettler- scales at the various points of sale. Even ingredients and allergens are stored there, allowing specific customer inquiries to be answered.

All documents from goods receipt through to shipping are ultimately collected in the document management system for electronic invoice verification and recording approval processes: supplier certificates, item specifications, and declarations of conformity, with automatic reminders when they expire. Delivery notes are posted at the same time.

Tino Winterhalter has known winweb-food for around 25 years and still has ideas about what he would like the ERP system to simplify next: “Winweb has a warehouse location management system, which would also bring us significant added value. Perhaps we can make that happen in the foreseeable future.” So that Pumuckl’s “chee-yese” does not first have to be searched for in the warehouse and picking routes can be managed more efficiently.