CASE STUDY
Customer Story 11er
11er Nahrungsmittel GmbH is a food manufacturer and major player in the Austrian food industry, specialising in the production of high-quality and special frozen potato specialties.
Challenge
The Challenge: Manage a large number of article and supplier documents in one system
In this particular case, the challenge for the food manufacturer was to manage a large number of article and supplier documents in one system. The items are mainly raw materials (goods purchased from suppliers for further processing, e.g. cream cheese, starch, butter or diced bacon). For each of these items and for the suppliers, specific certificates and documents are required, such as product specifications, HACCP flowcharts, risk assessment questionnaires, GMO declarations, organic certificates, GFSI-recognized certificates and many others, which must be obtained, checked, accepted or rejected and filed. All these steps must be documented.
Before Simvia
"In the past, we had to find out the status of certain documents and certificates from various Excel spreadsheets. We used the tables to compile the data for individual requests to each of our suppliers and sent them by email. Not only was it time-consuming and very labor-intensive, but it was also frustrating to manually request the necessary documents from suppliers - especially if the documents returned were incomplete or incorrect. We entered reminders in our calendar and kept checking with the supplier.”
"The information was split into Excel spreadsheets for raw materials, merchandise and suppliers, which made updating the supply chain structure error-prone and finding the information we needed a time-consuming task. These manual processes were not only labor-intensive, but also very difficult for interns to keep track of, for example, so this work could not be delegated.”
Solution
During implementation and onboarding, the Simvia team initially provided an Excel spreadsheet and assisted with data entry. The main work for 11er Nahrungsmittel GmbH consisted of setting the correct tags and occasionally correcting the master data. The rest was done by the Simvia Customer Success team and 11er Nahrungsmittel GmbH appreciated the support and help provided throughout the process.
Result
"The introduction of Simvia has fundamentally improved our workflows. The platform enables us to manage our documents and certificates in a transparent and organized way. Many time-consuming, manual processes are now a thing of the past. Simvia enables us to present an automatically recorded documentation of the review and acceptance of documents during audits and provides a clear overview of the compliance status of our articles and suppliers."
Accordingly, the time required to manage and check documents has been significantly reduced by using Simvia. The ability to define requirement rules that help 11er Nahrungsmittel GmbH to systematically collect the necessary information was cited as particularly useful. The result: Simvia has led to a noticeable increase in efficiency in our quality management.
"The platform offers a variety of helpful functions, including an improved overview of suppliers and articles, optimized management of our requirements and a dashboard for monitoring our tasks. Automated requests, centralized document storage and automatic audit documentation have increased our security during audits. Simvia makes it easy to demonstrate a comprehensive overview of compliance with requirements."
Essentially, Simvia has not only optimized workflows, but also increased efficiency, a sense of security and transparency in 11er Nahrungsmittel GmbH's operations.
