About the organisation
Huuskes provides companies and healthcare institutions (such as nursing homes, small-scale housing and hospitals) throughout the Netherlands with food & drinks. They are a total partner in this: they deliver traditional, fresh meals, but also other necessary groceries. Huuskes was founded in 1956 by Henk Huuskes Sr. In the meantime Huuskes has grown rapidly and they have more than 1000 employees and six branches throughout the Netherlands!
Challenge(s)
IT plays an important role in supporting the daily process at Huuskes. It is therefore important that the systems are always up and running. This is logical, because absolutely no orders are allowed to fall out: this could mean that people in the care centers do not receive a meal, with all the consequences that entails. To ensure that orders do not fail, insight is needed into orders (for both Huuskes and the customer) and the correct order information must be supplied on time. It should be easy for customers to place orders with products they need. It must also be possible to react actively in case something goes wrong, so that a solution can be offered to the customer in time. Preferably with as few manual actions and paperwork as possible. In addition, Huuskes has to deal with various market developments and legislation and regulations. In the food industry there are more and more requirements when it comes to product information and food safety. This means that the data stream that needs to be processed gets bigger and bigger and that the product information has to be communicated very accurately. Huuskes, like Retail organizations for example, has to deal with ever-increasing expectations of service and delivery. Ordered today is preferably delivered tomorrow, which is true in the B2C market, but also seeps through to the B2B market. As a B2B organization, Huuskes is more or less forced to keep up with these changes: an ongoing challenge. Finally, due to the dynamics and rapid growth of the organization, it is a challenge to let the IT landscape move with the organization.
Solution(s)
As a strategic IT partner, CAPE Groep wants to contribute to Huuskes being able to realize its ambitions, to keep up with the dynamic food industries in the Netherlands and Germany and to be resilient for the future. Huuskes has the basis of her IT landscape in order, her systems have not been down since March 2018. eMagiz is a permanent part of this stable basis (for integrating internal and external systems): all order lines (an average of 70.000 per day) go through purchase links (140) that have been developed with eMagiz. We also developed the Huuskes Article Management System (HAM) and the Validation Orders System (VOS). These provide the correct article information and transparency in the orders (flow) at the front, right up to Huuskes' Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Huuskes Article Management System (HAM) The HAM collects all article information from Huuskes' internal system and from external databases such as Brandbank, PS in Food and Prodakt (Germany). This concerns nutritional and allergen information and, for example, images. With the HAM, Huuskes' ERP system can be relieved of the amount of data it has to process. The ERP system only needs to process the minimum required product information for the main process. Validation Orders System (VOS) All orders placed via Huuskes Shop (and Eten&Zo) are placed in the VOS via the customer's purchasing system (five different purchasing systems are now connected). The VOS takes care of all preconditions for the order before it ends up in Huuskes' ERP system (via the eMagiz integration 'broker'). Once in the ERP system, it is no longer possible to actively respond to it. Using the VOS, Huuskes can see exactly what is happening (real-time) or has happened with an order message: an audit trail can be seen and you can see, for example, when an order has been sent and delivered. In this way, it is possible to trace where something goes wrong or where an order has gone wrong and you can actively respond to this. You could actually say that the VOS is a Monitoring System for all orders, until they end up in the ERP system. In addition, eMagiz ensures that if an order is submitted too late to the ERP system, it does not 'fall out of the system' but (via alerting from the VOS to the application manager) ends up at customer service. Customer service will then contact the customer and provide a solution.
Benefits
The developed integrations and applications provide benefits for Huuskes in various areas.
- Scalability
- Active Customer Service
- Data management, real-time information provision & transparency
- Agile for new laws and regulations and market developments
- Eliminate paper invoices and packing slips
