What matters is eatin’ well

Schwamm & Cie GmbH in Saarbrücken has been navigating its business with winweb-food for more than 20 years – and still has big plans for the ERP inventory management system. Schwamm and Winweb share a long history of collaboration: “winweb-food has been implemented so extensively throughout the entire operation that switching systems would be very difficult,” 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-standing collaboration with Winweb, but also takes this opportunity to look to the future. After Schwamm had only just managed the Y2K conversion of its custom-programmed inventory management system, the company decided to prepare for the new millennium with a new, future-proof system. It had become almost impossible to track which prices had been agreed with which customers, and there was no order history anywhere either.

Go to the Rhinelanders…

But where to? „One vendor on the market was not user-friendly, heavily DOS-based and complicated“, Hirschmann recalls. With Winweb, on the other hand, even the gut feeling was right: „Go with the Rhinelanders“, said the senior boss, „they are nice people.“ It was therefore a good fit that winweb-food was also user-friendly and could provide the requested reports Of course, there were also discussions about whether to venture into the still relatively new world of Windows with Winweb. „And ultimately, price was also a deciding factor“, says Hirschmann.

The evaluation of the new system began in 2000. It started with dispatch: „This is our main area of focus, because the company is heavily focused on dispatch“, Hirschmann said. Route logistics and -tracking were the main focus. The MIS period comparison was therefore jointly developed by Schwamm as early as 2001: „The management-information-system as an analysis tool already existed, but the ability to compare freely definable periods was our goal and a complete innovation“, Hirschmann said. Nothing like that had existed anywhere at the time. „We wanted a trend analysis tool to compare data and see how business with each customer was developing.“ Data from the old system were even imported into winweb-food for this purpose.

Once an innovation, now the standard

What was once a novelty is now standard: Information such as each customer’s order history can be retrieved at any time or their total sales can be analyzed at the click of a mouse. The system also calculates sales prices while taking into account all terms and subsequent costs such as annual rebates. „We spent many evenings on the phone discussing requests and ideas,“ Winweb Managing Director Willi von Berg also recalls from his dealings with one of his first customers. „And Winweb always listened carefully, because every update brought innovative enhancements; each time things moved in a new and positive direction,“ adds Hirschmann. Today the proprietary Winweb EDI converter is indispensable when supplying major customers such as Rewe and Co., making it possible for customer orders, delivery and freight forwarding orders as well as invoices to be transmitted electronically. „Picking is carried out largely using scanners. This reduces errors and ensures faster order picking,“ says Fabian Quante, the consultant responsible at Winweb. Following successful load verification the freight forwarding orders are transmitted from winweb-food via the EDI-IFTMIN interface to the freight forwarder and the required SSCC labels are printed directly from the system.

Fast and flexible

In a second step, winweb-food was also introduced in goods receiving in the mid-2000s. Here, the quantities ordered are compared with the actual quantities delivered and simultaneously the quality assurance inspection plans are retrieved. Incoming invoices are checked in the system, assigned to the respective supplier and transferred to financial accounting . In 2013, Bizerba’s price labeling system was integrated with the Winweb system. Since then, the entire production process including carcass cutting has been managed using winweb-food. This includes the management of cutting lists, the calculation of cutting yields based on actual weights, the calculation of material prices and production costs, actual recipe weighing throughout all production stages including quality assurance inspection plans as well as the calculation of nutritional values, allergens and ingredients. Batch traceability and final packaging checks complete the range of functions. All production data collected can be analyzed quickly and flexibly.

Document management under construction

Currently the document management system is being introduced, in which all documents will be collected: supplier certificates, product passports, supporting documents and delivery notes will soon be automatically assigned to the relevant transaction using barcode recognition. “We are not entirely convinced by it yet, because dedicated document management systems handle this better,” says Hirschmann. But the Winweb module is integrated into the system and no additional interface is required. By contrast the company is satisfied with the management of returnable empties: “We tried to develop our own program for this but failed,” admits the IT manager. The company therefore plans to use the returnable empties app from Winweb soon. Hirschmann also looks ahead, as the company has become more open to the outside world, particularly to suppliers and customers, over the years. “Today we have to share more of our data with other companies, which also increases the risk. Our greatest concern is, of course, attacks from outside.” Schwamm is therefore considering moving more and more data to the cloud to improve its protection. Hirschmann: “In time, we will see where this journey leads.” 

www.schwamm.de
www.winweb.de