Industry: Meat
Robinson Meats, Dublin’s leading catering butcher, is strategically located within the Dublin ring road – the ideal base for their fleet of refrigerated vans to swiftly supply the capital city’s booming hospitality trade at short notice with a range of more than 2,000 meat products. Efficient order management and logistics are pivotal in a high-pressure environment where errors can prove costly.
Fast moving, high value stock on countdown
Robinson Meats has over two thousand finished product items, all with a high value and a short shelf life. In such a dynamic, high-pressure context, products that are inadvertently left behind can quickly transform from potential profits into significant losses.
Additionally, short- or incorrect deliveries can lead to dissatisfaction among chefs, who are often highly demanding and pressured on time.
Faced with these challenges, Robinson required a robust and reliable system to ensure that the correct cuts reach the right customers punctually without fail
Paperless picking with automatic assignment to route
The ERP system from CSB manages incoming sales orders and all item-specific information, including special customer requirements.
Each customer is assigned to a van route, and new customers are integrated into the most convenient existing routes. CSB’s mobile solution (Mobile ERP) then guides the picking employees via wireless handheld scanners, allowing them to directly assemble orders into the correct stack for each van route. This eliminates the need for paper picking lists and reduces the likelihood of errors since all items are scanned. Moreover, van drivers do not need to perform secondary picks of customer trays, as their loads are pre-assembled.
Janet Dooley, office manager at Robinson Meats, is excited about the system’s features. “We like the way you can assign a customer to a route because that means each customer pick is automatically stacked onto the right van load. The traceability is also great, and we use that a lot because we get such a lot of audits now.”
Traceability
Traceability requirements in the meat processing industry are exceptionally stringent and continue to intensify. However, supply chains can be lengthy and complex, with cattle possibly born, reared, and slaughtered in different countries. The CSB-System can record all these details and retrieve them within minutes.
Essentially, traceability is the outcome of diligent record keeping and real-time data capture during the stages of receiving, storage, processing, and picking. CSB hardware, such as the Racks, in conjunction with mobile scanners, facilitates accurate, real-time recording of stock movements and transactions.
Labelling
Product labelling serves as a crucial means of communication with the customer and is a legal requirement as well as a fundamental aspect of traceability. Labels contain vital information, bearing significant commercial and safety implications regarding weights, prices, and allergens.
All pricing information at Robinson is centrally managed by CSB, and their interfaced scales ensure that labels accurately reflect the correct product weight, price, and allergens consistently.
All in one system
The CSB Quality Management module enables the recording of meat origins upon reception and additional quality control checks, such as vehicle temperature and condition. These checks can be initiated in the process at defined critical process steps, and further processing can be restricted within the system until corrective actions are taken or an authorised manager releases the product. “It’s great that everything is all joined up in one system. That way, we are more efficient and more secure,” Henry Farrell, managing director of Robinson Meats, is happy to report.