Schwamm & Cie GmbH in Saarbrücken has been navigating with winweb-food for more than 20 years – and still has a lot planned with the ERP merchandise management system. Schwamm and Winweb are connected by a long period of collaboration: “winweb-food is introduced 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 to cope with the year 2000 conversion of the individually programmed merchandise management system, they decided to position themselves for the new millennium with a new system that would be secure for the future. 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”, Hirschmann recalls. With Winweb, on the other hand, even the gut feeling was right: “Go with the Rhinelanders”, said the senior boss, “they are likeable.” It was a good fit that winweb-food was also user-friendly and could provide the desired analyses. Of course, there were also considerations as to whether to venture into the still relatively young Windows world with Winweb. “And ultimately, it was also a price decision”, says Hirschmann.

It started in 2000 with the evaluation for the new system. Work began with goods issue: “That is our main forte, because the company is focused on goods issue”, says Hirschmann. Route logistics and recording were the main focus. The MIS period comparison was therefore already launched by Schwamm in 2001: “The management information system as an analysis tool already existed, 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 see how the individual customers develop.” For this purpose, data from the old system was even imported into winweb-food.

Previously a novelty, today standard

What used to be a novelty is standard today: For every 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 discussing wishes and ideas”, recalls Winweb Managing Director Willi von Berg about one of his first customers. “And Winweb always listened carefully, because every update brought innovative new features; each time it moved 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 transmit customer orders, delivery and forwarding orders as well as invoices electronically. “Picking is largely done by scanner. That reduces errors and ensures faster picking”, says Fabian Quante, the responsible consultant at Winweb. After successful loading control, the forwarding orders are transmitted in winweb-food to the forwarding agent via the EDI-IFTMIN interface and the required NVE labels are 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 QA inspection plans are queried. The incoming invoices are checked in the system, assigned to the respective supplier and transmitted to financial accounting. In 2013, the PAZ from Bizerba was connected to the Winweb system. Since then, the entire production process, including cutting, has been running via winweb-food. This includes the management of cutting lists, the determination of cutting yield through actual weighing, the calculation of material price and production costs, actual recipe weighing across all production stages including the QA inspection plans, as well as the calculation of nutritional values, allergens and ingredients. Batch traceability and finished packaging control round off the range. All production recordings can be evaluated quickly and flexibly.

Construction site document management

The document management system is currently being introduced, in which all documents are collected: supplier certificates, product passports, proofs and delivery notes are soon to be automatically assigned to the appropriate process via barcode recognition. “But we are not entirely positive about that yet, because systems that specialize in document management can do something like that better”, says Hirschmann. However, 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 empties: “We tried to set up a program for it ourselves, but failed”, the IT manager admits. Therefore, they intend to use Winweb's empties app soon. Hirschmann also dares to 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 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