Industry: Meat
The Wolf group is among the top ten sausage manufacturers in Germany. Information technology is closely associated with the excellent market position of the traditional company. With many digitization measures, Wolf and its managing director Jan Seidel laid the foundation for extensive integration.
Good data management needs a control center
Just like many other companies in the meat and sausage industry, the Wolf group is on the verge of change. Besides good product quality, data management is becoming increasingly important for their success in this complex industry. There is a change in the expectations and demands for information by the market players: “Today, data is crucial, for example about origin, production, quality and billing. We do not only need this information for ourselves in order to be able to respond quickly. We also need to provide this data to our suppliers and customers. Let’s put it straight, without data, you won’t get a listing on the market,” says Jan Seidel, Managing Director.
Following various digitization measures, the four production facilities of Wolf have acquired an ideal data-oriented position. Jan Seidel relies on coherent IT as a control unit to manage, optimize and document all processes of the company. In doing so, the medium-size enterprise aims at achieving a visionary strategic goal: being a major player in digitization.
Data as a lever for increasing efficiency
In an early digitization wave about 20 years ago, Wolf implemented the ERP system by CSB at all of its locations. Today, the company uses the software to manage all data, to plan procurement and production, to optimize recipes and to enhance the transparency of costs and gross margins.
In its transport logistics, the electronic (IT aided) optimization of routes enabled Wolf to achieve improvements in route scheduling, distances, capacity utilization, load weights and volumes, making the most of the available vehicles and staff. “The entire project paid off in less than 6 months because we were able to cut down on many routes,” Seidel reports.
After all, the focus on data assures full traceability. To be able to identify products quickly in case of an incident, every incoming raw material is assigned a lot number which it keeps throughout the entire processing of the batch in production and all further steps. As the weigh price labelers and labeling systems receive their data from the CSBSystem, traceability data can be encoded in 2D barcodes (QR, Data Matrix, etc.), which are attached to the single packages. In parallel, the data is transferred to consumer information systems such as ftrace and mynetfair.
Digitization lays the foundation for a successful business
Jan Seidel has a clear vision of how to proceed with digitization at Wolf. Ultimately, all processes should be controlled by the IT system to make the paperless factory become a reality.
Currently, Wolf focuses on capturing the data of the production machines in use and further improving the utilization of this information. In this context, connecting the filler lines to the ERP system is the first step towards achieving full transparency in the filling process. At the end of the day, the networked production should bring many economic benefits, including the determination of the overall equipment effectiveness (OEE). The actual quantum leap will be the enhanced control of the different departments, machines and margins. “First and foremost, we produce meat products and sausages. But we also want to achieve world-class level when it comes to digitization. For us this is the basis of a successful business.”
