From sausage to squid

In the cash & carry fresh market Mattfeld relies on organization via the ERP system winweb-food

The family business Peter Mattfeld & Sohn, a full-range supplier with core expertise in meat, serves a broad clientele in the food industry. Thus, at the Cash & Carry fresh market, everything from meat and fish to fruit and vegetables to non-food items can be purchased that restaurateurs, butchers or large-scale kitchens require. Since 2013, the ERP system from Winweb has already been used in meat processing, and is now also being introduced in the Cash & Carry fresh market.

The cash & carry fresh market, the company's largest division and 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, clinics and canteen operators, butchers and SMEs order and buy. Speed, efficiency and customer-oriented handling are the priority here and are implemented with Winweb's ERP system.

An important step in this direction was the partial migration of the Navision system to winweb-food: While there had previously been two separate databases, these have now been merged together with all master data, because a shared database makes maintaining the data and creating reports much easier. This extremely demanding project could only be implemented on this scale through the intensive collaboration between Winweb and those responsible at Mattfeld. But many other applications in the Cash & Carry fresh market could also only be realized in this way.
Since most customers prefer to order by telephone, the sales team creates the Customer orders in the system. It is helpful that the items purchased by each customer over the past 100 days are automatically displayed. At the same time, the orders are received by the ten pickers in the store, who process around 100 orders every day. They access the orders on tablets and assemble the products on rolling carts in the wholesale store. The tablets are connected to the network via WLAN and allow the user to quickly collect goods for ordered jobs throughout the entire store.
The items are scanned using a finger scanner in order to be identified and automatically assigned to the accessed document. Error excluded thanks to the ERP system: If an incorrect product is scanned, the system immediately reports an error. If, on the other hand, the line with the scanned product turns green, everything is correct. At present, route optimization is still a thing of the future: If also Storage and storage location managementwere transferred from Navision to winweb-food, the system can specify the walking sequence for the picker. And even customer orders are soon to be assigned to employees depending on their complexity. This ensures that new employees do not have to process orders with 50 or more items right away.

400 Customers approximately 100 km around Hamburg are supplied weekly on different routes. Using QR codes on the delivery notes, the 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.

Precise information for the pickers and the customers in the store is provided by the ESL, the Electronic Shelf Label. The electronic price labels display the item description and number, price and unit of measure and can be changed automatically from the system. For this purpose, they are supplied with master data by winweb-food.
Mobile weighing, recording items, and final invoicing at the checkout are also all about efficiency: For customers who buy their goods directly in the Cash & Carry fresh market, employees weigh and record the products at various touchscreen stations and generate receipts from the system. Each station has full access to the customer's receipts that have already been recorded in order to add, modify, or delete products. Once everything has been recorded, the delivery note and invoice are printed out. At the checkout, only the invoice then needs to be scanned and paid. Since cash handling affects the efficiency of staff and business operations, Mattfeld uses cash recyclers from Glory. The machines are fully integrated into the ERP system and automate cash handling: The system takes over the payment process when the payment method "cash" was selected. winweb-food handles the control, monitoring, and operation of the machine on the software side. The risk of errors and losses is minimized, staff efficiency and customer service are optimized.

An important requirement for winweb-food throughout the entire project was the interpretation of the many different barcodes on all items that Mattfeld receives from its suppliers on the various products. The system can now read all common barcodes – and responds immediately with an error message if a barcode could not be identified. “There is still all sorts of work to be done”, says Jürgen Finnern. But much has already been resolved satisfactorily, adds the commercial manager and authorized signatory. “The fact that Winweb, for example, handles all interfaces cleanly – I would definitely put a star behind that.”

Mattfeld

The family-owned company Peter Mattfeld & Sohn GmbH developed over the course of three generations from a pure agency for pork and beef halves into one of the highest-revenue companies at the meat wholesale market in Hamburg. Today, the full-range supplier employs up to 160 staff around the clock from Sunday to Friday evening. For around 1300 customers per day, about 20000 t of food are handled per year in four business areas: Cash & Carry fresh market, meat cutting and direct sales, meat imports for wholesale, and convenience manufacturing. Peter Mattfeld founded his company in 1950 with two employees at the slaughterhouse in Hamburg. In 1963, his son Jörg Mattfeld, a trained butcher, returned after a year in Canada with new ideas and joined the company. A small pickup market covering 80 m2 laid the foundation for today’s Cash & Carry fresh market, which was expanded in 2000. Fruit and vegetables as well as a fresh fish department were added to the fresh meat offering. In 2016, a new building created additional space, so that the Cash & Carry fresh market now covers 6000 m2 for around 12000 items.

www.mattfeld.de
www.winweb.de