ERP system supports contract packers with operational processes

Anyone who stays in hotels more often – whether as a vacation guest or on business trips – has probably already held them in their hand and even tasted them: small sweets in the room, nuts at the hotel bar or cereals on the breakfast buffet. Many of these come from Ahnert GmbH in Lohmar, whose daily work is made easier by the ERP system winweb-food.

Around 5,000 hotels from Iceland to the Baltics, from Trondheim in Norway to the Canary Islands are supplied by Ahnert with breakfast cereals, bar snacks or guest gifts. Major customers like 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 tons of salad topping per month. "For all this we need a good merchandise management system", says Ahnert COO Jan Wilkens. The 53-year-old originally comes from a meat processing company. Since the software company Winweb is very well known in this industry with its ERP system, it is not surprising that Wilkens made an inquiry there five years ago:

Ahnert does not produce itself, but rather assembles the goods: nuts, dried fruits, snack items, pastries and pralines are packaged in jars, transparent bags, boxes, paper bags and tins according to customer requirements. “We have around 2,000 different products in our range”, says Wilkens. To avoid getting mixed up with this variety, the products ordered from all over the world in goods receipt – chickpea pops with chili and lime, chocolate muesli hearts or cucumber-ginger shots – are compared in the ERP system winweb-food with the actual delivered quantities. The batches for traceability are created automatically and at the same time QA inspection plans are queried. “The Winweb app for internal quality assurance makes our work easier”, Wilkens explains. Among other things, it is checked whether the goods are complete and the packaging is undamaged. The best-before date is checked and the product declaration is compared with the ordered items. All data is recorded and scanned directly at goods receipt. The QA app stores the results directly in the quality assurance journal.

Automated functions

Recipes are also stored in winweb-food. However, this is not about the ingredients for a baking recipe, about spices and ingredients, but about the composition of one of the many different products that are delivered to customers. If one of the parts is not provided in the required quantity, the software automatically reports an error. “As with baking, this way you can be sure that in the end there is enough of everything available for packaging”, explains Wilkens. Thus, depending on the product, the individual components of the Naschi packets for the Radisson hotels can be found in the ERP system: For one delivery, these can be 120 cone bags, 120 clips for sealing, 120 labels with the customer's logo and 80 grams of chocolate-coated currants. The 120-time printout of the ingredients, which is also managed by winweb-food, is also listed here. “The system recalculates the content and allergen labeling fully automatically if a customer wants to have chocolate-coated blueberries in the cone bags in addition to the chocolate-coated currants”, explains Wilkens. “That really makes life much easier for us.”

This also simplifies calculation, because the ERP system calculates the material price and manufacturing costs for each recipe and takes into account all downstream costs such as advertising subsidies or annual rebates. If the product composition changes or the snacks are delivered in small jars instead of cone bags, the system automatically recalculates at the click of a mouse. “Radisson orders around 60,000 jars filled with sweets with the hotel logo every year”, says Wilkens. “If even small details in the composition change here, this way we still always keep the calculation up to date.” The result is incorporated into the manufacturing cost calculation in order to be able to calculate the sales prices even more precisely.

Document management for all receipts

Picking is largely done by scanner. This reduces errors and ensures faster processing. The shipping data is then automatically transmitted in winweb-food via an EDI interface to external software that prints the required package labels for various freight forwarders and shipping companies. The third-party software used at Ahnert also provides the absolutely necessary tracking information for packages that are shipped to countries outside the European Union. Once the ordered items have been assembled by the picker, the best-before date is checked via the QA inspections and it is noted whether the goods are properly packed – only then does the software grant approval for goods issue. All documents are ultimately collected in the document management system: supplier certificates, item specifications or certificates of conformity, for which there is automatically a reminder when they have expired. At the same time, the delivery notes are posted via the ERP system. To make winweb-food even better, Jan Wilkens is supporting the development of an app for customer relationship management. “Winweb's CRM system is already very good, but I also want to be able to access our data on the go with a digital device,” he explains. The development team therefore offered him the opportunity to use the prototype of the CRM app, which he accepted without hesitation: “I am only too happy to give feedback on what is good and what can still be improved. In the end, Winweb leaves nothing to be desired.”