The main thing is to eat well

Schwamm & Cie GmbH in Saarbrücken has been navigating with winweb-food for more than 20 years - and still has many plans for the ERP merchandise management system. Schwamm and Winweb are connected by a long period of cooperation: “winweb-food is implemented 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 dares to take a look into the future at this point. After Schwamm had just managed the 2000 transition of the individually programmed merchandise management system, the decision was made to position themselves for the new millennium with a new system that would be future-proof. Because it was hardly possible any longer to track 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 to the Rhinelanders”, said the senior manager, “they are likable.” It was a good fit that winweb-food was also user-friendly and offered the desired Reportswas 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”, said Hirschmann.

The evaluation for the new system started in 2000. It began with goods issue: “That is our main strength because the company is goods issue focused”, says Hirschmann.Route logistics and recording were the focus. The MIS Period Comparison was therefore co-founded by Schwamm as early as 2001: “The Management Information System already existed as an evaluation tool, 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 to see how the individual customers were developing.” For this purpose, data from the old system was even imported into winweb-food.

Formerly a novelty, today standard

What used to be a novelty is standard today: For each customer, for example, the order history can be accessed at any time 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 talking through wishes and ideas”, recalls Winweb Managing Director Willi von Berg about one of his first customers. “And Winweb always listened well, because with every update there were innovative new features; each time it went 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 shipping orders as well as invoices electronically. “Picking is largely done by scanner. This reduces errors and ensures faster picking”, says Fabian Quante, responsible consultant at Winweb. The shipping orders are transmitted in winweb-food after successful loading control via the EDIIFTMIN interface transmitted to the forwarding agent 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 plansqueried. The incoming invoices are checked in the system, assigned to the respective supplier and to theFinancial accountingtransmitted. In 2013, the Bizerba price labeling system 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 QA inspection plans as well as the calculation of nutritional values, allergens and ingredients.Batch traceabilityand finished goods packaging inspection round off the spectrum. All production records can be evaluated quickly and flexibly.

Construction site document management

At present, the Document management systemintroduced, in which all documents are collected: supplier certificates, product passports, verifications and delivery notes are soon to be automatically assigned to the appropriate process via barcode recognition. “We are not yet entirely positive about that, however, because systems that specialize in document management can do that 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 returnables: “We tried to get a program for this off the ground ourselves, but failed”, admits the IT manager. Therefore, they intend soon to use the Returnables appuse from Winweb. Hirschmann is also taking a look into the future, because over the years the company has become more open 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 greatest fear is of course attacks from the 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