From sausage to squid
At its fresh food cash-and-carry market, Mattfeld relies on organization using the winweb-food ERP system
The family-owned company Peter Mattfeld & Sohn, a full-range supplier with core expertise in meat, serves a broad customer base in the food industry. Its cash-and-carry fresh food market offers everything that restaurateurs, butchers or commercial kitchens need, from meat and fish to fruit and vegetables and non-food items. Winweb’s ERP system has been used in meat processing since 2013 and is now also being introduced in the cash-and-carry fresh food market.
The order picker retrieves the orders on the tablet.
The Cash & Carry fresh food market, the largest division and the company's cash cow, offers 12 000 products, including 1000 types of sausage alone, international cheese specialties, fish, squid and dairy products, fruit and vegetables, alcoholic beverages and non-food items. This is where restaurateurs and wholesalers, hospitals and canteen operators, butchers and SMEs place their orders and make their purchases. Speed, efficiency and customer-focused processes are the top priorities and are delivered using Winweb's ERP system.
Since most customers prefer to order by phone, the sales team creates the sales orders in the system during the call
An important step in this direction was the partial migration of the Navision system to winweb-food: Whereas there had previously been two separate databases, these have now been merged along with all master data, as a shared database makes maintaining the data and generating reports much easier. A project of this complexity and scale could only be implemented through close collaboration between Winweb and the responsible staff at Mattfeld. This also made it possible to implement many other applications in the cash-and-carry fresh food market.
As most customers prefer to order by phone, the sales team creates the customer orders in the system during the call. A helpful feature is that the items purchased by each customer over the past 100 days are displayed automatically. At the same time, the orders are sent to the ten order pickers in the market, who process around 100 orders every day. They retrieve the orders on tablets and assemble the products on wheeled trolleys in the wholesale market. The tablets are connected to the network via Wi-Fi and allow users to quickly collect goods for orders from across the market.
The items are scanned using a finger-mounted scanner so that they can be identified and automatically assigned to the document displayed. The ERP system eliminates errors: If the wrong product is scanned, the system immediately reports an error. If, on the other hand, the line containing the scanned product turns green, everything is correct. Route optimization is still a future prospect: Once inventory and storage location management have also been migrated from Navision to winweb-food, the system will be able to specify the picking route for the order picker. Even customer orders will soon be assigned to employees according to their complexity. This ensures that new employees do not immediately have to process orders containing 50 or more line items.
The items are identified using a finger scanner and automatically assigned to the document opened.
400 customers within a radius of around 100 km of Hamburg receive weekly deliveries on various routes. Using QR codes on the delivery notes, drivers can check when loading the goods onto Mattfeld’s own trucks whether the products to be delivered are actually intended for the current route – error prevention at its best.
The tablets can be conveniently mounted anywhere for order picking.
For customers who purchase their goods directly from the cash-and-carry fresh food market, employees weigh and record the products at various touchscreen stations and generate receipts directly from the system.
ESLs, or Electronic Shelf Labels, provide precise information for order pickers and customers in the market. The electronic price tags display the product description and number, price and unit of measure and can be updated automatically from the system. To enable this, winweb-food supplies them with master data.
Efficiency is also the focus of mobile weighing, item recording and final invoicing at the checkout: For customers who purchase their goods directly from the Cash & Carry fresh food market, employees weigh and record the products at various touchscreen stations and generate documents from the system. Each station has full access to the customer’s previously recorded documents, allowing products to be added, changed or deleted. Once everything has been entered, the delivery note and invoice are printed. At the checkout, only the invoice needs to be scanned and payment collected. Since cash handling affects staff efficiency and business operations, Mattfeld uses cash recyclers from Glory. The machines are fully integrated into the ERP system and automate cash handling: The system manages the payment process when “Cash” is selected as the payment method. winweb-food handles the control, monitoring and operation of the machine at software level. The risk of errors and losses is minimized, while staff efficiency and customer service are optimized.
An important requirement for winweb-food throughout the project was the ability to interpret the many different barcodes on all the items that Mattfeld receives from its suppliers on various products. The system can now read all common barcodes – and responds immediately with an error message if a barcode cannot be identified. “There is still all sorts of work to be done,” says Jürgen Finnern. However, much has already been resolved satisfactorily, adds the commercial director and authorized signatory. “For example, the fact that Winweb gets all the interfaces working properly – I would definitely give that a star.”
Mattfeld
Over three generations, the family business Peter Mattfeld & Sohn GmbH developed from an agency dealing exclusively in pork and beef sides into one of the highest-revenue companies at Hamburg’s wholesale meat market. Today, the full-range supplier employs up to 160 people around the clock from Sunday to Friday evening. Around 20000 t of food are handled annually for approximately 1300 customers per day across four business divisions: Cash & Carry fresh food market, meat cutting and direct sales, meat imports for wholesale trade and convenience-food production. Peter Mattfeld founds his company in 1950 with two employees at the abattoir in Hamburg. In 1963, his son, trained butcher Jörg Mattfeld, returns after a year in Canada with new ideas and joins the company. A small 80 m2 cash-and-carry market lays the foundation for today’s Cash & Carry fresh food market, which is expanded in 2000. Fruit and vegetables as well as a fresh-fish department are added to the fresh meat range. In 2016, a new building creates additional space, bringing the Cash & Carry fresh food market to 6000 m2 with around 12000 products today.
Images: Melahn/Mattfeld
Published in Fleischwirtschaft
Winweb Content Team
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