Industry: Meat
Low prices, permanent supply capability and maximum freshness: food retailers and consumers make many demands on poultry suppliers. Janez Rebec has consistently prepared the Slovenian poultry processing company Pivka for the challenging conditions. The most important prerequisite for this has been a future-proof process and IT landscape.
New processes and digital data flow required
Poultry processors are well off? Yes, as the global sales of chicken fillets, chicken wings etc. are booming. But poultry production is not a sure-fire success. “We cannot accept any major cost drivers if we want to achieve a good margin. This starts in raw material procurement and continues with the use of the chickens and, finally, picking,” says Janez Rebec, Managing Director of the Slovenian poultry processing company Pivka. Their biggest operational challenge: At Pivka, there is a time gap of several hours between the slaughter of the animals and the processing of the customer orders. While slaughtering starts at 5 a.m., the first orders don’t come in until after 1 p.m. In the past, this lead to extreme peaks and inefficient processes in the production and packing departments.
About twelve years ago, Janez Rebec was no longer prepared to accept this. His goal: to achieve the all-encompassing digitization and optimization of processes, production structures and data flows and thus to manage better the decoupling of process stage scheduling.
ERP and buffer inventory for an optimized push and pull production
Pivka has implemented the main steps for this in collaboration with the experts of CSB. As the basis for their ambitious optimization project, the project managers chose a combination of an ERP system and a buffer inventory to create a perfect balance in the entire push and pull production. Packed into crates, today the processed animals are moved to the warehouse on a single-item basis. From there, the articles are moved just in time to the lines for packing and labeling, in accordance with the orders. CSB-Inventory Management is the central control unit here. It makes sure that the right raw materials go to the right lines.
Today, CSB-Racks ensure maximum transparency at the lines as they communicate online with the ERP system and supply the staff with all relevant data for order processing. In return, all data originating in production are transferred directly into the ERP system. This real-time data flow enables the managers to keep track of the current activities and allows for intelligent business management. Inventory consumption, sales figures, production volumes: The important facts are available at the press of a button.
Production fit for growth
For Pivka, digitizing the processes constituted a major step forward towards a successful future. The entire organization has become faster and is significantly more costefficient today than it was a few years ago.
The interaction between ERP system, buffer inventory and data entry points in production helps to make processing of the orders a lot less stressful. What is more, Pivka can better fulfill the wishes of its customers in terms of availability and freshness thanks to the improved reconciliation of data on inventory, capacity and demand.
These positive effects are also reflected in the key performance indicators: The production volume has been increased by approximately 40 percent. With an annual turnover of 38 million Euro, Pivka has now become the number 2 in the Slovenian poultry market.
“When we introduced the CSB-System here, we were a very small company in the Slovenian market. But in the last ten years, we’ve been growing twice as much compared to the past, also with the help of CSB. Of course, there are still things that we could improve with our ERP system,” reports Managing Director Rebec.
