IDM ¦ Technology/IT
IT-secured company growth
Milk and cheese from the Zurich mountain regions
at Natürli Zürioberland
The independent small cheese dairies in the Zurich Oberland
focus on production. However, for many of them,
Natürli Zürioberland AG takes care of sales, marketing,
logistics and, in some cases, cheese ripening. This concept
has enjoyed increasing success for almost thirty years – a
growth that needs to be controlled and managed. To support this,
the company has recently started using a new ERP system and now
has a secure IT base for business in the years to come.
It all began in the 1990s with the idea of saving small mountain
cheese dairies from extinction and helping them meet the
demands of today's cheese market. Instead of producing widely
known cheeses, they should in future focus primarily on regional
specialities. The "Natürli Zürioberland" cooperative, which was
founded for this purpose, took over tasks such as marketing, distribution
and logistics – and was successful very quickly, so that
the cooperative could be converted into a public limited company.
Mastering complexity
"The continued success proved the founders of our company
right," says Gino Barille, IT manager at Natürli Zürioberland AG.
"The annual growth of our company has continued unabated ever
since. But the more the business grew, the greater the demands on
the management of business processes became." For many years,
an ERP (Enterprise & Resource Planning) system based on Excel and
the database software Access, some of which had been developed
in-house, did the job. Eventually, however, it was no longer able to
cope with the complexity. "Too many double entries of processes
or difficult maintenance due to partly unknown software codes
showed more and more clearly: we need a new, modern ERP solution,"
says Barille.
"In the end, the decision was made in favour of an ERP system
oriented towards medium-sized companies and tailored to the
processes of the food industry," adds Barille's colleague Manuel
Diener, the head of logistics at Natürli Zürioberland. "With the
GUS-OS Suite, we are treading a middle path: We have a standard
solution that has been established on the market for a long time,
which on the one hand offers an extremely large number of functions.
On the other hand, it doesn't overwhelm us with its own
complexity and the sometimes long communication channels that
are often found with the really big software providers."
32 · July/August 2022 ¦ international-dairy.com
From "mild" to "extra mature"
Today, the new ERP solution controls all essential business processes
– starting with the eight clay stone cellars for cheese ripening
from "mild" to "surchoix" to "extra", through the connection
with distribution, the ordering processes with the office staff, to
delivery and logistics. In addition, the company distributes other
articles for partners in the Zurich region. This also means that both
micro and larger companies have to be mapped, even though they
may use completely different communication and IT systems.
The biggest change brought about by the GUS-OS Suite was
the replacement of many manual activities: "Before, many employees
ran around here with lists," recalls IT manager Barille, "but
today every material movement and every step flows directly into
the system." Now, there are also fixed roles for the individual
employees, for example for purchasing or logistics. "This creates
transparency and enables targeted and data-supported production
planning," says Barille.
One example is the logistics process: At the beginning there
is the order entry, which defines the delivery date and the tour. In
/international-dairy.com
