March 1, 2004

Made to Order - Dierbergs streamlined its bakery and deli operations with Eatec's foodservice system-and is glad it did.
By Joseph Tarnowski

Who knew that sliced eggs could be so difficult? Employees at Chesterfield, Mo.-based Dierbergs' central kitchen and bakery certainly did. Picture 20 stores, each having different sliced-egg needs. Some want egg salad, others want the sliced eggs on sandwiches or salads, and still others want sliced eggs as part of an entrée. And each store needs them in different increments: Some need two pounds of sliced eggs as an ingredient in 10 pounds of salad, some need 15 pounds, and others need 20.

In the past, each of Dierbergs' stores would fax over an order for its sliced eggs-in terms of the finished product, such as egg salad-to the central kitchen/bakery (the stores don't prepare foods on-site). At the kitchen an associate would enter the information from all 20 stores into another spreadsheet, which totaled the amount of sliced eggs needed for all the stores, and then the company would place an order with one of its vendors. "Our corporate philosophy is that we want only fresh product," says Nancy Wangles, g.m. of foodservice. "We don't inventory any items-we produce only to order. If a store orders one gallon of something, we make one; if they order 20 gallons, we make 20."

Too much paperwork
This total amount was sent to the production area, which, when the eggs arrived, would get to work preparing the sliced eggs for the stores. A report produced at the kitchen would let workers know how to divide the batch of sliced eggs to send them to the stores.

All of this labor was undertaken for just one deli item. One can imagine the amount of paperwork that was involved in keeping every deli item-sandwiches, salads, pasta, entrees-fresh and in stock every day in every store. "We would have hundreds of pages of faxes coming in every day, and they would each have to be manually entered," Wangles notes.

Not only was this labor-intensive, but, since Excel isn't a relational database, there also wasn't much Dierbergs could do with the data that was gathered but print reports. "Forecasts were incredibly time-consuming," Wangles says. "We had the spreadsheets that would tell us what we shipped last year to the stores, but it was all done by item sold, such as the 10-pound tubs, so we would have to backtrack and tally up that information for us to approximate how much product was ordered last year. And, obviously, you use the same ingredient in more than one product. For example, how much mayonnaise is used in the different salads? So you basically had to rekey everything into the spreadsheets and recombine it to batch size again to determine how much was needed for a week."

Those days are over now. With EatecNetX from Emeryville, Calif.-based Eatec, all Wangles has to do is type in a date range, and the system automatically lists what was shipped to the stores.

Dierbergs implemented the Eatec system two years ago to automate the ordering from the stores to the kitchen and bakery, and from the kitchen and bakery to the company's suppliers.

EatecNetX is an enterprise back-office management system for multi-unit foodservice operators. The software runs from a centralized data source and is deployed across the Internet or company intranets.

Now, for a store to place its order, an associate simply has to log in to the Eatec system and enter the information. Since it's a centralized system, the kitchen and bakery have the information in real time, and reports are generated with the click of a mouse. That means no more faxing and no more rekeying data.

The Eatec system also helps the kitchen and bakery facilitate ordering from suppliers. "We needed to automate the ordering process and to tie in the ingredients that have to be purchased to make each recipe," Wangles says. "We had no reliable payables system, either. In the past, when we faxed orders to suppliers and they sent the product in, we would have the constant dilemma as to whether it was the right price they were charging us, since we weren't sending them a P.O. with agreed-upon terms and prices.

"So we set up all the ingredients that we buy, and then we were able to cut P.O.'s. Now, as we get quotes in-weekly market price quotes from our vendors-we're able to enter them into the system, and it sets the price. This way, there aren't a lot of price variations coming in as it hits the door. This makes the product more uniform, so that we can initiate bids from other vendors instead of trying to dig out a supplier's old invoice number to figure out what they called the product in order to get multiple bids on the same thing. Just having a uniform system is a blessing."

Wangles has found that the system helps to eliminate out-of-stocks by keeping better inventory, actually boosting sales, because the stores are always stocked with plenty of product. Determining just how much the system increases sales is the next step of the implementation-integrating EatecNetX to the point of sale. According to Wangles, "This will help us to better forecast our stores and streamline operations even further."

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