REFERENCE

Heideküche Ehlers

Hot snack and fresh salads for the whole heath

In addi­tion to the basic func­tions such as goods receipt and goods issue as well as inven­to­ry man­age­ment, which not every sys­tem in ques­tion could clean­ly solve for pre­pared dish­es, the prod­uct label­ing was also to be con­trolled via the new sys­tem. When weigh­ing out the dressed sal­ads, for exam­ple, which are fresh­ly pre­pared and weighed out in the morn­ing, it should be pos­si­ble to assign them direct­ly to the mar­ket to which they will lat­er be deliv­ered. This would be the only way to ensure cor­rect invoic­ing with­out dou­ble entry.

It does not work without networking

“As a basis for this, reli­able inter­faces to the weigh­ing sta­tions and label­ing equip­ment were essen­tial,” recalls Ehlers. “That’s why we relied on the rec­om­men­da­tions of our scale sup­pli­er and only short­list­ed sys­tems from cer­ti­fied Bizer­ba soft­ware part­ners.” The broad­est pos­si­ble sup­port was also required for label print­ers, in order to remain flex­i­ble for the future beyond the exist­ing Zebra devices.

More com­plex than the hard­ware inter­faces was the clar­i­fi­ca­tion of the net­work­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties with the oth­er soft­ware used. For exam­ple, the invoic­es cre­at­ed should be trans­ferred direct­ly to finan­cial account­ing for post­ing and should also be avail­able to the tax advi­sor as a dig­i­tal copy at any time.

“And final­ly, seam­less col­lab­o­ra­tion with ReSy4 was par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant to us,” Ehlers recalls. This soft­ware from guenter borchers rezep­turen­man­age­ment is con­sid­ered the leader in legal­ly com­pli­ant dec­la­ra­tion, nutri­tion­al val­ue cal­cu­la­tion and aller­gen label­ing of pre­pared foods and was thus already set. “Only the use of this expert soft­ware could guar­an­tee that we would always remain on the safe side in terms of food leg­is­la­tion.”

One for all

The exam­ple of ReSy4 in par­tic­u­lar made it clear how com­pre­hen­sive­ly iFood from agma­da­ta had solved the net­work­ing issues. This means that auto­mat­ic dec­la­ra­tion can be trig­gered at any time via an inter­face for all recipes stored in iFood. The prod­uct name is then returned, adjust­ed if nec­es­sary, the list of ingre­di­ents accord­ing to the Food Infor­ma­tion Reg­u­la­tion (LMIV), i.e. with aller­gens high­light­ed, with quan­ti­ta­tive infor­ma­tion on the val­ue-deter­min­ing ingre­di­ents (QUID infor­ma­tion) and, where nec­es­sary, foot­notes with the pre­scribed addi­tion­al infor­ma­tion for cer­tain ingre­di­ents, as well as the com­plete nutri­tion­al label­ing. In addi­tion, a DATEV inter­face was avail­able for trou­ble-free con­nec­tion to the tax office, and all exist­ing devices were also sup­port­ed.

“Oth­er sup­pli­ers tried to make us afraid of inter­faces and thus want­ed to force us to buy every­thing from a sin­gle source,” sum­ma­rizes Ehlers. “agma­da­ta, on the oth­er hand, has giv­en us free­dom of choice and helped us inte­grate exist­ing com­po­nents and add oth­er solu­tions to the ERP sys­tem, which we choose entire­ly accord­ing to our needs.” The wide range of exchange for­mats sup­port­ed means that all options remain open for the future — whether it be the use of a doc­u­ment man­age­ment sys­tem, a CRM sys­tem or the elec­tron­ic exchange of invoic­es with cus­tomers and sup­pli­ers, for exam­ple.

Accord­ing­ly, the deci­sion was made in favor of iFood in the sum­mer of 2022. The sys­tem house, which had been sup­port­ing Hei­deküche Ehlers since Edeka’s time, pro­vid­ed a serv­er in the cloud on which agma­da­ta could install the soft­ware. Thus, the 20 employ­ees in pro­duc­tion already start­ed work­ing on their own sys­tem dur­ing the train­ing ses­sions.

Quickly learned and set up

Since there was still suf­fi­cient time before the planned sys­tem launch in the spring, the train­ing ses­sions for the indi­vid­ual mod­ules were sched­uled in a relaxed man­ner in eight units spread over sev­er­al weeks. A sys­tem con­sul­tant from agma­da­ta joined the indi­vid­ual meet­ings via video con­fer­ence. “In this way, the employ­ees got to know the new sys­tem remote­ly and were able to grad­u­al­ly famil­iar­ize them­selves with all the func­tions,” reports Ehlers.

At the same time, they used this time for prepa­ra­tions, for exam­ple, cre­at­ing cus­tomers and sup­pli­ers and draw­ing up price lists. “While agma­data’s account man­agers were always avail­able to assist us, we hard­ly need­ed to take advan­tage of this offer thanks to the hands-on train­ing.”

So every­thing was ready for the “go live” at the pro­duc­tive start of the Hei­deküche Ehlers. At the begin­ning of 2023, pro­duc­tion moved to a spa­cious new build­ing in the imme­di­ate vicin­i­ty of the pre­vi­ous loca­tion in the Ede­ka store in Bisp­in­gen. “This meant that we were offi­cial­ly inde­pen­dent and, in addi­tion to food pro­duc­tion, we also had to take care of many admin­is­tra­tive and orga­ni­za­tion­al tasks that had not pre­vi­ous­ly been incurred in this way due to inte­gra­tion into the Ede­ka store.”

The software makes it possible

So from March onwards, the new soft­ware was used to book goods receipts, weigh prod­ucts, cre­ate deliv­ery bills and write invoic­es. From the very begin­ning, the trans­fer of account­ing data and com­plete invoice doc­u­ments to account­ing as well as tax office was used. After a start-up phase, the com­mu­ni­ca­tion with ReSy4 for the food dec­la­ra­tion also came into use as planned and the label­ing labels are print­ed direct­ly from the mer­chan­dise man­age­ment sys­tem.

In the com­ing months, even more func­tions of the proven soft­ware will be grad­u­al­ly intro­duced. But Ehlers’ con­clu­sion is already clear: “Thanks to the high lev­el of automa­tion of the process­es, iFood made the spin-off pos­si­ble for us in the first place. Instead of hav­ing to deal with the admin­is­tra­tive and logis­ti­cal chal­lenges, I can now con­cen­trate entire­ly on expand­ing the range of goods and win­ning more cus­tomers for the new­ly found­ed Hei­deküche Ehlers.”