References

REFERENCE

GOSCH

From North Frisia to the whole Republic

Elling­st­edt, a small vil­lage near Schleswig with a pop­u­la­tion of just 800, is a tran­quil place. Sheep graze around the pro­duc­tion hall, the sun shines on the large fore­court of the man­u­fac­to­ry and you almost think you can see the col­or­ful mar­ket that reg­u­lar­ly takes place here. But the first impres­sion is decep­tive — as soon as you enter the pro­duc­tion, pro­fes­sion­al bus­tle dom­i­nates the scene. “In a way, we are a down-to-earth coun­ter­part to the com­pa­ny’s head­quar­ters on the fash­ion­able island of Sylt,” says plant man­ag­er Friedrich-Wil­helm Kiy with a smile. “But that’s pre­cise­ly why we need a high­ly pro­fes­sion­al orga­ni­za­tion, and for a long time now that can only be achieved with the appro­pri­ate IT sup­port.”

The IT era at GOSCH began in the nineties with the DOS ver­sion of Nav­i­sion. When a switch to Microsoft Dynam­ics became inevitable after the com­pa­ny was bought out by Microsoft in 2002, Kiy took the oppor­tu­ni­ty to look for a soft­ware solu­tion that was bet­ter suit­ed to the spe­cif­ic needs of the fish­ing indus­try. “At that time, it was already fore­see­able that trace­abil­i­ty would become our biggest chal­lenge,” Kiy recalls. “That’s why we also chose agma­da­ta, who had this theme down pat even back then.” With PYRAMODUL, GOSCH relied from then on on the lead­ing enter­prise resource plan­ning sys­tem for the meat and fish indus­try. The exist­ing arti­cle mas­ter data and inven­to­ries could be trans­ferred to the new soft­ware thanks to appro­pri­ate import inter­faces. Microsoft Dynam­ics was pur­chased as a sup­ple­ment for account­ing.

Fish is not a “standard

Nev­er­the­less, the start with the new soft­ware should still cost the fish spe­cial­ists some nerves. “The fact that agma­da­ta was pro­fi­cient in food trace­abil­i­ty was, of course, an impor­tant pre­req­ui­site. But to use it, we first had to set up the sys­tem for us, from batch man­age­ment to match­ing bar­code labels,” recalls Kiy. “For­tu­nate­ly, the man­u­fac­tur­er sup­port­ed us to the best of their abil­i­ty. With SAP, for exam­ple, we would have had to have every­thing com­plete­ly repro­grammed — the price/performance ratio would nev­er have been right for us.

How­ev­er, the food spe­cial­ists at agma­da­ta did not man­age entire­ly with­out repro­gram­ming. The stan­dard solu­tion at that time did not yet cov­er all the specifics of the fish indus­try. In addi­tion to the com­mon arti­cle name, the genus and species names had to be stored in Latin, as well as oth­er infor­ma­tion such as the con­di­tion, catch areas or whether the fish orig­i­nates from aqua­cul­ture or net fish­ing. This infor­ma­tion is trans­ferred to the goods receipt as a sug­ges­tion and can be adjust­ed there. Assigned qual­i­ty man­age­ment plans are used to record data for qual­i­ty assur­ance and store it for sup­pli­er eval­u­a­tion.

Over the years, numer­ous changes in the law have caused the cat­a­log of require­ments to grow and grow. Recent­ly, calo­rie and nutri­tion­al infor­ma­tion must also be stored in the arti­cle mas­ter in order to include them in the print­out of labels for sales pack­ag­ing. “Any nor­mal mer­chan­dise man­age­ment sys­tem would have been hope­less­ly over­whelmed by this flood of reg­u­la­tions,” Kiy knows. “agma­da­ta has grown with the demands and has always deliv­ered new ver­sions on time to neat­ly meet the increased reg­u­la­to­ry require­ments.” Based on these pos­i­tive expe­ri­ences, it was easy for the man­ag­er to decide in 2012 to switch to the mod­ern PYRAMODUL suc­ces­sor iFood, which runs entire­ly in the brows­er with Web 2.0 tech­nol­o­gy.

The right view for everyone

Since then, col­leagues in the office and at exter­nal loca­tions in par­tic­u­lar have ben­e­fit­ed from the new web inter­face. “iFood shows us much more infor­ma­tion at a glance,” finds Kiy, although he has not yet used the graph­i­cal eval­u­a­tions that have also become pos­si­ble. “From a man­age­ment per­spec­tive, it has become much eas­i­er to use. You don’t have to scroll as often now, you see every­thing in con­text and you can eas­i­ly call up impor­tant addi­tion­al infor­ma­tion by sim­ply click­ing on it.”

The old, text-based inter­face con­tin­ues to be used at the oper­a­tional work­sta­tions. Indeed, in addi­tion to the six PC ter­mi­nals in the admin­is­tra­tion, Elling­st­edt has two touch­screen con­soles in pro­duc­tion and four more in the ware­house. Sev­en hand­held devices with built-in scan­ners and two scales with label print­ers are also con­nect­ed. Four remote work­sta­tions on Sylt also work with the sys­tem and are main­ly used for the sep­a­rate­ly man­aged mer­chan­dise man­age­ment of the fish restau­rants on the island.

Inci­den­tal­ly, the GOSCH loca­tions order their require­ments — from smoked eel, lob­ster and wine to sou­venir plates, toi­let paper or latex gloves — quite clas­si­cal­ly by fax. In the office, the orders are record­ed and a pick­ing slip is cre­at­ed, which sum­ma­rizes the indi­vid­ual items accord­ing to their respec­tive stor­age loca­tions. In addi­tion to cold and dry stor­age facil­i­ties, a frozen food ware­house with stor­age space man­age­ment and the sep­a­rate pro­duc­tion ware­house in Elling­st­edt, GOSCH also oper­ates two exter­nal ware­hous­es in Ham­burg, where fish deliv­ered in con­tain­ers from over­seas is tem­porar­i­ly stored until it is used.

All processes clearly defined

With so many ware­hous­es and a good 1000 dif­fer­ent items, it means avoid­ing unnec­es­sary jour­neys. Clear­ly defined process­es ensure this and the trans­paren­cy required at Fisch. Thus, when assem­bling a deliv­ery, employ­ees only have to work through the already route-opti­mized sequence of the pick­ing slip and scan the picked goods with the hand­held device. This means that the actu­al quan­ti­ties and batch­es are cor­rect­ly record­ed, the deliv­ery bill is auto­mat­i­cal­ly print­ed in the office and the goods can be loaded onto one of the six trucks that make their dai­ly jour­ney to the Repub­lic. On the way back from their tours, which usu­al­ly last sev­er­al days, they dri­ve to the exter­nal con­tain­er ware­hous­es in Ham­burg as required and bring the fresh goods they need back to Elling­st­edt. There, the signed deliv­ery receipts go back to the office, any cor­rec­tions are tak­en over and the invoic­es are writ­ten. Final­ly, via an inter­face, the finan­cial data is trans­ferred to Microsoft Dynam­ics, which is respon­si­ble for account­ing and pay­ment con­trol.

“The key thing for us is that we can tell where every sin­gle item is, where it’s going, and which deliv­ery batch it came from,” Kiy explains. And not just for mer­chan­dise: iFood also pro­vides com­pre­hen­sive sup­port for pro­duc­tion. Thus, when a prepa­ra­tion is made, the removal of the ingre­di­ents from the pro­duc­tion ware­house is record­ed in the quan­ti­ties spec­i­fied by the recipe, the respec­tive ingre­di­ent batch­es are record­ed by hand­held scan and doc­u­ment­ed under the new­ly assigned batch num­ber. “With­out any extra effort, we know for each buck­et of gar­lic sauce exact­ly which spices from which man­u­fac­tur­er are in it with which batch,” Kiy is pleased to say.

The pro­duc­tion man­ag­er also likes to rely on iFood when pur­chas­ing goods, for exam­ple, when he wants to know the lat­est pur­chase prices from var­i­ous sup­pli­ers or, in the case of cur­rent con­tracts, when he has to ask how much has already been called off, what is cur­rent­ly on its way and what quan­ti­ties are still open. And last but not least, mer­chan­dise man­age­ment sup­ports arti­cle main­te­nance when it comes to iden­ti­fy­ing those prod­ucts for dis­con­tin­u­a­tion that are only pur­chased in small quan­ti­ties or by a small num­ber of cus­tomers.

Conclusion: The right mix

After ten years of expe­ri­ence with agma­da­ta soft­ware, Kiy’s sum­ma­ry is clear. “For us, the col­lab­o­ra­tion has def­i­nite­ly been worth­while,” he empha­sizes. “Even the stan­dard soft­ware com­pre­hen­sive­ly cov­ers the basic require­ments of the fish indus­try. And for our var­i­ous spe­cial requests, it has nev­er tak­en more than a phone call and agma­da­ta has respond­ed.”

If he could wish for one thing, it would be: “That the leg­is­la­tor does­n’t bom­bard us with new require­ments quite so often in the future. iFood takes the work out of it for us, but we’re start­ing to run out of space on the labels!”