Processes securely under control

Industry-specific ERP system simplifies daily routines at the cheese manufacturer

For around 25 years Käserebellen GmbH in Upper Bavaria has been working with the proven ERP system from Winweb. Over time increasingly modern functions of winweb-food were used around the production and distribution of new creations as well as tried and tested good cheese varieties. The industry software is used in various areas of the company.

The “Köhse” is the latest creation from the Käserebellen. Even Pumuckl would eat it, though he usually turns up his nose at cheese. And so the little goblin from the pen of Ellis Kaut adorns the company’s carrot cheese. “Retail asked for a product specifically for children”, says Sales and Marketing Manager Matthias Köpf, who did not need to be told twice. “And so we took carrots and cheese and invented Köhse with them.”

No wonder Köpf listens to the retail trade, after all a full 37 percent, almost 1,700 tons of cheese, go into this sector every year. The wholesale trade is supplied with around 1,000 tons. Own stores and franchise shops receive around 15 percent of the total amount of cheese, which also roughly corresponds to the amount that is exported to specialist retail and all over the world. Still around 230 tons per year are shipped to private customers and almost 240 tons go to market traders, gastronomy and the hotel industry.

Around 500 farmers from Vorarlberg, Tyrol and the Allgäu supply about 50 million liters of fresh hay milk annually to the company's three own dairies in Vorarlberg and Tyrol. From around 15,000 liters of milk, 240 six-kilogram wheels of cheese are produced day after day, which are transported to Steingaden in Upper Bavaria for ripening, refinement and further processing, where the administration of Käserebellen is also located.

And this is where the industry software from Winweb Informationstechnologie GmbH from Aldenhoven near Aachen comes into play. Goods receipt in Steingaden is recorded in the ERP system winweb-food in order to be able to trace the batches seamlessly. At the same time, QA inspection plans are queried: Are the trucks clean? Is the temperature of the delivered wheels of cheese correct? And the quality as desired? With the help of the ERP system, this is checked and documented. It reports errors if something does not fit.

The cheese wheels are smeared and turned in the aging storage facility in Steingaden. “At our company, this is handled by a fully automated system including a robot”, informs Operations Manager and IT Head Tino Winterhalter. Up to 200,000 wheels of semi-hard and hard cheese can be regularly maintained in this way. Once the cheese is mature enough for further processing, it is refined with herbs and spices into 60 different varieties. The exact mixtures are also stored in winweb-food as recipes and recorded in the ERP system for each type of cheese. As soon as the cheese is ready for consumption, the wheels are cut, packaged, labeled and the NVE labels printed out accordingly in a fully automated process. By means of an EDI interface, all information about the ordered goods is exchanged with the retail trade.

A special feature is the web shop: “We have more than 100,000 customer addresses in the B2C sector”, says Köpf. In order to be able to process this large quantity, the online shop is connected to winweb-food. New addresses and customer orders are created here automatically. Since these are end customers, the orders are constantly changing. The orders are transferred directly into the system via EDI. “We already have an extremely high volume of documents”, reports Winterhalter. “The fact that we create and adjust the price lists via winweb-food makes the work much easier.” A model from Leich und Mehl is used as a price labeler, which can be integrated into the winweb-food process without any problems.

Orders are picked using hand-held scanners with touch displays, which report back to the ERP system which and how many pieces of cheese are to be shipped to which customer. This reduces errors and ensures faster processing. Once the ordered items have been assembled by the picker, the best-before date is checked and it is noted whether the goods are properly packaged. Only then does winweb-food grant approval for goods issue. The shipping data is automatically transmitted from the ERP system to the parcel service provider via a certified interface. The latter sends the parcel labels, which are then printed in winweb-food.

For their own branches and for the franchise stores, the Käserebellen use the Winweb store system, with which the items together with the current prices are transferred directly to the Mettler scales in the various points of sale. Even ingredients and allergens are stored there so that customer inquiries can be answered specifically.

All receipts from goods receipt to shipping are ultimately collected in the document management system for electronic invoice verification and the recording of approval processes: supplier certificates, item specifications or certificates of conformity, for which there is automatically a reminder when they have expired. At the same time, the delivery notes are posted.

Tino Winterhalter has known winweb-food for around 25 years and still has ideas about what he would like to simplify next with the ERP system: “Winweb has a storage location management system that would also bring us great added value. Perhaps we will still be able to manage that in the foreseeable future.” So that the “Köhse” from Pumuckl in the storage does not first have to be searched for and the picking routes can be better controlled.