Schmidt Zeevis
Fish company rewarded in search for insight and efficiency
The biggest and best fishmonger in the Netherlands is in Rotterdam The shop is the eye-catching facade of Schmidt Zeevis, a fish company operating internationally and which supplies wholesalers, various supermarket chains and the top of the hotel and catering industry. Recently Schmidt has radically automated its internal operations with Microsoft Dynamic® NAV software and the efficiency has improved tremendously.
Schmidt Zeevis employs more than one hundred people and has recently become part of the Kennemervis Groep, who expect a turnover this year of more than a quarter of a billion euros. Controller Jos van Vuren is responsible for the financial and administrative organisation and for IT within the company. "Our company actually has five divisions, each tuned to a specific target group", he explains. "The first division supplies the hotel and catering industry and is responsible for 65 percent of the turnover. Our vans travel from Friesland (in the north of Holland) to Maastricht (in the south), and in the west of Holland we deliver everything. This is a very specific sector, because these customers know exactly what they want. The second division supplies two ship stores which in turn supply fish to the ocean cruisers in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Antwerp. The third division deals with import and export which we now handle more and more frequently ourselves. I call our shop the fourth division and the fifth is our wholesale business which supplies wholesalers to the hotel and catering industry and nine Albert Heijn outlets, one of the largest supermarket chains in the Netherlands and many others.
Motive
An important motive for Van Vuren was efficiency improvements. "When I started here in the 1990s we worked with forms which people filled in manually and were then passed on to the administration department. We knew then that we needed extensive IT systems, primarily to balance the inventory administration. Weight loss was a thorny issue: this mounted up in the course of the year. We also wanted to get a better idea of the filleting losses; these differ per fish, weight and operation - for a more concrete impression of the cost price of a certain product." As far as control was concerned, the IT systems were to help reduce the number of mistakes made. Van Vuren: "From the time we take an order from a customer, we must be able to guarantee that that customer will get what he wants. That is more complicated than it seems. Because each customer has his own specific requirements."
Selection phase
"I started looking for a suitable IT system in 1995", Van Vuren told us. "In our situation we have to cope with registering the quantity of product in numbers and in kilos. But we also wanted an information system to fully match our business processes, including the production activities. And we wanted a system that was very flexible - that is Dynamics NAV. We started off by implementing Dynamics NAV for the sales, purchasing and the financial administration departments. In 1998 we also wanted to include the production planning (filleting and processing fresh fish) in the package. By then a Windows version was available, and that actually meant that we ended up starting a completely new IT project. At that time we also looked for a new partner to help us with the project. We chose Schouw Informatisering in the Netherlands to implement the system with us. Besides their knowledge of IT systems they also know a lot about the business processes in the food industry. And Schouw is has not just been our IT partner, Schouw has been our consultant. The people from Schouw have helped out in the company for a while. That is important, because Schouw had to make the translation from the virtual to the physical reality."
Facts are important
Van Vuren: "In my position as controller I knew that our organisation had much room for improvement, particularly in terms of efficiency. But if you don’t have the right supporting information it remains a hunch. During the first phase of the project we mapped out the various logistics processes together with the people from Schouw Informatisering." Internally there are four distinct logistics at Schmidt Zeevis: unprocessed fish, processed fish, frozen fish and delicatessen/preserved products. Each of these flows has its own administrative and logistics disciplines. "Unprocessed fish loses some of its weight and that has to be registered somewhere. Processed fish is labour intensive and also has trimming losses. In the other two production processes errors have to be avoided at the order picking phase", says Van Vuren. The sales orders are now split automatically so that the employees only see the order lines for their own department. Schmidt Zeevis works with crates in various different colours: each department has its own colour crate. The dispatch department can then easily see whether an order is complete.
Reconciled books
Industrial Scanvaegt terminals with barcode scanners have been installed in the factory for the registration of data on the shop floor. The terminals consist of a weighing system, a PC and a touch screen, all in one waterproof casing. The first control point is in the goods receipt department. For reasons of hygiene, incoming fresh fish is repackaged immediately in our own internal crates which are filled with fresh ice. Each crate is labelled with a barcode sticker which indicates the contents and the lot number. So each crate is given a unique number enabling us to guarantee the traceability of the fish from start to finish; another HACCP requirement. There are also a number of terminals in the production area, Van Vuren explains. "It took the filleters quite some time to read the order lines and to write out production orders. Now they only see the order lines for the products which they have to process. The operations carried out and the resulting weights are registered here." An extra control point in the order pick phase should reduce the number of logistics errors made with preserved, delicatessen and frozen products. Van Vuren: "And now all our products have a barcode: when we scan an order line, the system tells us immediately whether the right item has been picked. Another advantage of this way of working is that new employees with little experience can be set to work after a short training period - and with the labour market the way it is at the moment, that’s a significant advantage."
Many advantages
We have deliberately tried to keep the system simple, explains Van Vuren: "Within the software we use ’standard screens’ in which our people can enter and look up the information required, but they cannot change anything. Then the implementation is not difficult, because the same transactions have to be carried out more than a hundred times a day. So getting into the routine of things goes very quickly. There was much anxiety about using computers: at the start of the training some people just didn’t believe what they saw. And initially we used the old manual orders and the new computer system together, that was assuring. But in practice the system turned out to be so easy to use, that the old manual orders were soon dismissed. It also became clear that we could easily export data from Dynamics NAV to Excel. In the old days we had to make all kinds of reports manually; now we have a list of reports on the screen, you just choose which one you want and paste the data in Excel. That saves a lot of time. Another considerable advantage is that the filleters are not wasting their time on things other than filleting. And because we can now see what the yield is from certain operations, we can correct some of our cost prices. The plan is eventually to reduce the number of man hours worked. A tremendous improvement in efficiency for us. And the system is never finished: in the future our information requirements will only continue to grow."