References

REFERENCE

Tauernfleisch

Supermarket cutlets with virtual farm tour

In inter­na­tion­al com­par­i­son, Tauer­fleisch, with 12,000 slaugh­tered ani­mals per year and a good 20 employ­ees, tends to be one of the small to medi­um-sized com­pa­nies. So it may come as no sur­prise that the slaugh­ter and cut­ting plant in Flat­tach has retained the virtues of a region­al craft busi­ness. While the mar­ket is just start­ing to ask for local and region­al prod­ucts, the com­pa­ny goes a whole step fur­ther: like the tra­di­tion­al butch­er store, the Carinthi­ans can in fact still tell the cus­tomer where the ani­mal he has on his plate came from.

At least when it comes to Tauern­fleis­ch’s spe­cial­ty: local veal and beef in organ­ic qual­i­ty, which is slaugh­tered in-house and large­ly processed in sin­gle-ani­mal cut­ting. Only the large quan­ti­ties addi­tion­al­ly required for cater­ing sales are bought in as veal pis­tols or whole calves. These are then processed pure­ly in the batch, as is com­mon else­where. How­ev­er, indi­vid­ual ani­mal cut­ting with con­ti­nu­ity from the farmer to the meat counter and to the con­sumer means com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent require­ments with regard to oper­a­tional data and thus to IT.

Single animal dissection not in standard

The com­pa­ny had already sought the nec­es­sary soft­ware sup­port from the ERP provider agma­da­ta from Old­en­burg Mün­ster­land at the begin­ning of 2000 and found it in its spe­cial­ized solu­tions for the meat pro­cess­ing indus­try. At that time, how­ev­er, sin­gle-ani­mal cut­ting was not com­mon and not even pro­vid­ed for in the soft­ware from the out­set. Nev­er­the­less, the IT experts from Ger­many were able to help with the imple­men­ta­tion of the then stan­dard soft­ware PYRAMODUL through indi­vid­ual adap­ta­tions. Even if in the ear­ly years some things still seemed a bit hand­made and the com­fort was not quite per­fect, the trace­abil­i­ty could be guar­an­teed in any case.

Bet­ter process sup­port for pro­duc­tion and cut­ting should come in 2013 with the changeover to the suc­ces­sor soft­ware iFood. In the run-up to the event, the agma­da­ta devel­op­ers had invit­ed the Tauern­fleisch man­age­ment to their soft­ware forge in Gar­rel. In a joint meet­ing, the require­ments for indi­vid­ual ani­mal cut­ting were pre­cise­ly defined and put on paper. From the out­set, all par­ties involved agreed to use the ani­mal’s ear tag num­ber as the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion mark through­out instead of the batch num­ber nor­mal­ly used, and to pass this on from the cut­ting process to pick­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion. In addi­tion, the most impor­tant require­ment was that as much of the required data as pos­si­ble should result auto­mat­i­cal­ly from the process­es, in order to keep the data entry effort with­in a rea­son­able range for a medi­um-sized com­pa­ny.

Accord­ing­ly, the soft­ware, which went into pro­duc­tive oper­a­tion at the end of the year, relies con­sis­tent­ly on data trans­fer via EDI inter­face in addi­tion to fast user guid­ance with­out any bal­last. Thus, the most impor­tant infor­ma­tion already arrives at Tauern­fleisch togeth­er with the slaugh­ter cat­tle. In an upstream process, an inde­pen­dent clas­si­fi­er took care of the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and cat­e­go­riza­tion of each ani­mal, report­ed the change of loca­tion to the cen­tral AMA cat­tle data­base and, by com­par­ing it with this, estab­lished the dates of birth, rear­ing farm and the oth­er key data pre­scribed by the Euro­pean beef iden­ti­fi­ca­tion sys­tem. Once these have been auto­mat­i­cal­ly trans­ferred to iFood and a unique slaugh­ter num­ber has been assigned there, it is also already clear whether the rear­ing con­di­tions meet all the con­di­tions pre­scribed for the var­i­ous organ­ic labels in each case — this is ensured by a query in the pro­duc­er group’s con­tract farmer file includ­ing a check of the cur­rent organ­ic and project sta­tus.

The processes optimized

The slaugh­ter num­ber affixed to the car­cass on eight bar­code labels remains the pri­ma­ry iden­ti­fi­er right into the cut­ting process. Here, it is scanned one last time and matched with the asso­ci­at­ed ani­mal data in IT. In con­ven­tion­al batch cut­ting, for exam­ple, when 100 cut­lets are made from ten guns, iFood then assigns a unique batch num­ber under which these cut­lets are man­aged from then on. In sin­gle ani­mal cut­ting, on the oth­er hand, a spe­cial batch is cre­at­ed con­sist­ing of parts of only one ani­mal and iden­ti­fied by its ear tag num­ber.

Whether con­ven­tion­al or sin­gle ani­mal, the batch­es are sub­se­quent­ly divid­ed, packed and labeled. Since the sys­tem changeover in 2013, Tauern­fleisch has been using auto­mat­ic label­ing machines con­nect­ed to iFood, which cre­ate all the required cut­ting labels and final­ly take care of label­ing the sales pack­ag­ing. For each pack­age, the soft­ware gen­er­ates an eight-dig­it iden­ti­fi­ca­tion num­ber. This is shown on the label as a QR code which, unlike bar­codes, remains eas­i­ly leg­i­ble even on the vac­u­um pack­ag­ing used with its typ­i­cal wrin­kling thanks to its small­er size.

To iden­ti­fy the pack­ages dur­ing the final pick­ing process, the QR codes are scanned again. Using the pack num­ber, the sys­tem access­es the batch and the slaugh­ter ani­mals it con­tains with their respec­tive slaugh­ter num­bers and ear tag num­bers, retrieves all the asso­ci­at­ed data and uses this to cre­ate the required deliv­ery doc­u­ments. The deci­sive fac­tor here is that all data is acces­si­ble and can be com­bined as desired. Some time ago, for exam­ple, a cus­tomer want­ed to have all batch­es list­ed on his deliv­ery bills togeth­er with the respec­tive min­i­mum shelf life data, which can­not be found there by default. With agma­da­ta, how­ev­er, this was very easy to real­ize because all the basic data required was avail­able in the sys­tem.

Equipped for all eventualities

Tak­en togeth­er, the basic data trans­ferred via inter­face and col­lect­ed through­out the slaugh­ter­ing and cut­ting process form a detailed ori­gin sys­tem that has proven its worth dur­ing reg­u­lar vis­its by inspec­tors from the var­i­ous qual­i­ty seals. The usu­al ques­tions such as “Show me the deliv­ery bills for this one prod­uct,” “Show me the proof of which ani­mals went to cut­ting,” or “Show me the out­go­ing deliv­ery bill for this” were cov­ered by the soft­ware from the begin­ning. Over the years, it has also been pos­si­ble to com­pile the answers to many oth­er ques­tions into fin­ished reports. Just the fact that the con­trols are now so relaxed has made iFood worth­while for Tauern­fleisch. For the man­age­ment team, the key recipe for suc­cess is to have bro­ken down all the basic infor­ma­tion to the indi­vid­ual ani­mals dur­ing the redesign in the year. This coher­ent basic con­cept can also be built upon in the future.

Ulti­mate­ly, this ben­e­fits the con­sumer, who can trace the ori­gin of his meat pur­chas­es in detail at any time — even if not every cus­tomer wants to quick­ly watch a video por­trait of the farm of ori­gin on the way from the refrig­er­at­ed counter to the super­mar­ket check­out.