Always keep track of everything

ERP system supports co-packers in their operational processes

Anyone who frequently stays in hotels – whether on holiday or on business trips – has probably already held and even tasted them: small confectionery items in the room, nuts at the hotel bar or cereals at the breakfast buffet. Many of these products come from Ahnert GmbH in Lohmar, where the ERP system winweb-food makes daily work easier.

Around 5,000 hotels from Iceland to the Baltic states, from Trondheim in Norway to the Canary Islands are supplied by Ahnert with breakfast cereals, bar snacks or guest gifts. Major customers such as SAP receive nuts for meetings and conferences exclusively in paper bags, because the company no longer wants to use plastic. Or the burger chain „Hans im Glück“, which receives three tonnes of salad toppings every month. „For all of this, we need a good inventory management system“, says Ahnert COO Jan Wilkens. The 53-year-old originally comes from a meat processing business. Since the software company Winweb is very well known in this industry for its ERP system, it is not surprising that Wilkens contacted the company five years ago:

Ahnert does not manufacture the products itself, but instead packages the goods: nuts, dried fruit, snacks, biscuits and chocolates are packed in small jars, transparent bags, boxes, paper bags and tins according to customer requirements. “We carry around 2,000 different products,” says Wilkens. To keep track of this variety, the products ordered from around the world – chili and lime chickpea snacks, chocolate granola hearts or cucumber and ginger shots – are checked against the actual quantities delivered in the winweb-food ERP system at goods receiving. The batches are automatically created for traceability and the QA inspection plans are retrieved at the same time. “During this process the Winweb app for in-house quality assurance makes our work easier,” Wilkens explains. Among other things, staff check whether the delivery is complete and the packaging is undamaged. The best-before date is checked and the product labeling is compared with the items ordered. All data is recorded and scanned directly at goods receiving. The QA app saves the results directly to the quality assurance log.

Automated functions

Even recipes are stored in winweb-food. However, these are not the ingredients for a baking recipe, spices and other ingredients, but the components of one of the many different products supplied to customers. If one of the components is not provided in the required quantity, the software automatically reports an error. “Just like in baking, this ensures that there is ultimately enough of everything available for packing,” Wilkens explains. Depending on the product, the ERP system therefore lists the individual components of the Naschi packs for the Radisson hotels: One delivery may require 120 cone-shaped bags, 120 clips to seal them, 120 labels bearing the customer’s logo and 80 grams of chocolate-coated blackcurrants. The 120 copies of the ingredient information, which are also managed by winweb-food, are listed here as well. “The system fully automatically recalculates the ingredient and allergen labeling if a customer wants chocolate-coated blueberries in the cone-shaped bags in addition to the chocolate-coated blackcurrants,” Wilkens explains. “That really makes our lives much easier.”

This also simplifies costing, as the ERP system calculates the material price and production costs for each recipe and factors in all downstream costs, such as advertising allowances or annual rebates. If the product composition changes or the snacks are supplied in small jars instead of cone-shaped bags, the system automatically recalculates everything at the click of a mouse. “Radisson orders around 60,000 small jars filled with sweets and bearing the hotel’s logo each year,” says Wilkens. “Even if only minor details in the composition change, this allows us to keep the costing up to date at all times.” The result is incorporated into the production cost calculation so that sales prices can be calculated even more accurately.

Document management for all documents

Order picking is carried out largely using scanners. This reduces errors and ensures faster processing. The shipping data is then automatically transmitted from winweb-food via an EDI interface to external software, which prints the required parcel labels for various freight forwarders and shipping companies. The third-party software used by Ahnert also provides the essential tracking information for parcels shipped to countries outside the European Union. Once the order picker has assembled the ordered items, as part of the quality assurance checks the best-before date is checked and it is recorded whether the goods are properly packaged – only then does the software approve them for dispatch. Finally, all documents are collected in the document management system : supplier certificates, item specifications or declarations of conformity, with automatic reminders when they have expired. At the same time, the delivery notes are posted in the ERP system. To help make winweb-food even better, Jan Wilkens is assisting with the development of an app for customer relationship management. „The CRM system from Winweb is already very good, but I also want to be able to access our data on a mobile device while I am on the move“, he explains. The development team therefore offered him the opportunity to use the prototype of the CRM app , which he readily accepted: „I am only too happy to provide feedback on what works well and what could still be improved. This means that Winweb ultimately meets every need.“