FDBusiness.com

A bespoke IT system from food and drink specialist CSB-System has helped a Slovenian poultry processor to double its growth, improve cost-efficiency and increase production volume by 40%. Today Pivka Perutninarstvo has a turnover of €38 million and has become number two in the Slovenian poultry market.

Key to achieving these operational improvements was to overcome the challenge of the time gap of several hours that existed at Pivka between the slaughter of the animals and the processing of customer orders. While slaughtering starts at 5 am, the first orders do not come in until after 1 pm. This had led to extreme peaks and inefficient processes in the production and packing departments.

In collaboration with CSB, Pivka therefore sought to establish an all-encompassing digitisation and optimisation solution. This involved the combination of an ERP system and a buffer inventory to create a perfect balance throughout the push and pull of production.

The processed animals are now packed into crates and transferred to the warehouse on a single-item basis; from there they are moved just in time to the lines for packing and labelling. The process is overseen using CSB-Inventory Management which acts as the central control unit to ensure that the correct raw materials go to the right lines.

On each line a CSB-Rack® workstation, which combines automated data capture for weighing, pricing and labelling in a single operation, ensures maximum transparency of operations through online communication with the ERP system in order to provide staff with the relevant data for order processing. At the same time, all data originating in production are transferred directly to the ERP system. This real time data flow, with information available at the touch of a button, enables managers to keep track of activities, and provides intelligent business management, covering areas such as inventory consumption, sales figures and production volumes.

Key benefits for Pivka are a fast and significantly more efficient operation than a few years ago. In particular, the interaction between the ERP system, buffer inventory and data entry points helps to make processing of the orders a lot less stressful.  Equally important, Pivka can better fulfil the wishes of its customers in terms of availability and freshness thanks to the improved reconciliation of data on inventory, capacity and demand.

“When we introduced the CSB-System here, we were a very small company in the Slovenian market,” comments Janez Rebec, Managing Director of Pivka Perutninarstvo. “But in the last ten years, we’ve been growing twice as much compared to the past, also with the help of CSB.”