Main thing gudd gess

Schwamm & Cie GmbH in Saarbrücken has been navigating with winweb-food for more than 20 years – and still has a lot planned with the ERP merchandise management system. Schwamm and Winweb are connected by a long period of collaboration: “winweb-food is introduced so comprehensively throughout the entire company that a change would only be possible with great difficulty”, says Kai Hirschmann, Head of IT at Schwamm & Cie GmbH in Saarbrücken. And why would they? “The error rate is 0.001 percent”, says Hirschmann, who not only looks back on the long cooperation with Winweb, but also ventures a look into the future at this point. After Schwamm had just managed the Y2K conversion of the individually programmed merchandise management system, the decision was made to set itself up for the new millennium with a new system in a future-proof way. This was because it was hardly possible anymore to map which prices had been agreed with which customers, and there was also no order history anywhere.

Go to the Rhinelanders…

But where to? “One provider on the market was user-unfriendly, DOS-heavy and complicated”, recalls Hirschmann. With Winweb, on the other hand, even the gut feeling was right: “Go with the Rhinelanders”, said the senior boss, “they are likeable.” It was therefore a good fit that winweb-food was also user-friendly and offered the desired Analyseswas able to deliver. Of course, there were also considerations as to whether to immerse oneself in the still relatively young Windows world with Winweb. “And ultimately, it was also a price decision”, says Hirschmann.

The evaluation for the new system started in 2000. It began with goods issue: “This is our main focus, because the company is heavily oriented toward goods issue”, says Hirschmann.Route logistics and data recording were the main focus. The MIS period comparison was therefore launched by Schwamm as early as 2001: “The Management Information System as an analysis tool already existed, but it was our wish and an absolute novelty to compare freely definable periods“, says Hirschmann. At that time, this did not yet exist anywhere. “We wanted a trend tool to be able to compare data and see how the individual customers were developing.” For this purpose, data was even imported from the old system into winweb-food.

Formerly a novelty today standard

What used to be a novelty is standard today: The order history for each customer can be accessed at any time, for example, or the entire sales volume can be analyzed with a click of the mouse. The calculation of sales prices taking into account all conditions and downstream costs such as annual rebates also takes place in the system. “We spent many evenings on the phone discussing wishes and ideas“, recalls Winweb Managing Director Willi von Berg, also thinking back to one of his first customers. “And Winweb always listened carefully, because every update brought innovative new features; every time it moved in a new, good direction“, adds Hirschmann. Nowadays, Winweb's own EDI converter is used as an absolute must for supplying major customers such as Rewe and Co. in order to Customer orders, to transmit delivery and forwarding orders as well as invoices electronically. “Picking is carried out largely by scanner. This reduces errors and ensures faster picking”, says Fabian Quante, the responsible consultant at Winweb. After successful loading control, the forwarding orders are sent in winweb-food via the EDIIFTMIN interface transmitted to the freight forwarder and the required NVE labels printed directly from the system.

Fast and flexible

In a second step, winweb-food was also introduced in goods receipt in the mid-2000s. Here, the ordered quantities are compared with the delivered actual quantities and at the same time QS Inspection Plans queried. The incoming invoices are checked in the system, assigned to the respective supplier and to theFinancial accountingtransmitted. In 2013, the price labeling from Bizerba was connected to the Winweb system. Since then, the entire production including cutting has been running via winweb-food. This includes the management of the Disassembly lists, the determination of the cutting yield through actual weighing, the calculation of material price and production costs, the actual recipe weighing across all production stages including the QS inspection plans as well as the calculation of nutritional values, allergens and ingredients.Batch traceabilityand finished goods packaging control round off the spectrum. All production records can be evaluated quickly and flexibly.

Construction site document management

At present theDocument management systemintroduced, in which all documents are collected: Supplier certificates, item passports, certificates and delivery notes are to be automatically assigned to the appropriate process via barcode recognition in the near future. “However, we are not entirely positive about this yet, because systems that specialize in document management can do such things better”, says Hirschmann. But the Winweb module is integrated into the system and no additional interface is necessary. On the other hand, they are satisfied with the handling of empties: “We tried to set up a program for this ourselves, but failed”, admits the IT manager. Therefore, they intend toEmpties appuse from Winweb. Hirschmann is also daring to take a look into the future, because over the years the company has become more permeable to the outside world, to suppliers and customers. “Today we have to share our data more with other companies, which also increases the risk. Our biggest fear is of course attacks from outside.” That is why Schwamm is considering putting more and more data in the cloud in order to protect itself better. Hirschmann: “Let's see where the journey goes.” 

www.schwamm.de
www.winweb.de