Food manufacturer: four years of production automation and EDI

What came after launch

Months are counted from project kick-off. Each period also covers analysis and live testing on the client's side; the implementation itself took only part of it.

1. Months 5–7

   Production automation

   Implementation itself: about 4–5 weeks; rest of the period: analysis of the production process with the client, then testing and a gradual ramp-up in live operation on the client's side

   A production request for a finished product automatically creates the semi-finished requests and the raw-material transfer, production documents with lot and expiry date are created on their own, and a production portal in the intranet records actual consumption. Carton production is booked every night from shipped documents.

   Benefit: Breaking production down into semi-finished goods and raw materials, and creating production documents, no longer has to be done by hand. Differences between standard and actual consumption are booked straight from the portal, so stock records match real production.

2. Month 6

   Reliable automation

   Implementation itself: about 1 week in total; rest of the period: monitoring the stability and behaviour of the automation in live operation on the client's side

   Errors are written onto the order concerned, the automation runs on a reserved POHODA licence, and automatic failover to a standby instance was added later.

   Benefit: Users see any error on the very document they are working on instead of hunting for it in e‑mails. The automation does not take POHODA licences away from users and keeps running through an outage without manual intervention.

3. Months 7–9

   Stock-take and order tools

   Implementation itself: about 2 weeks in total; rest of the period: refining the requirements and verifying them on real stock-takes and orders on the client's side

   Receipts and issue notes generated from stock-take results, order lines split into cartons per pallet, and orders repriced to the price list valid on a chosen date.

   Benefit: Stock-take differences are not keyed into POHODA line by line but created from the stock-take results in one step. After a price-list change, selected orders are repriced at once, so invoices match the agreed prices.

4. Months 10–18

   Reports, stock accounting method A and cost centres

   Implementation itself: about 6–7 weeks in total; rest of the period: month-end closings, the client's accountants checking the postings, and verification in live operation

   Regular e‑mail reports on issues and units sold, automation adapted to stock accounting method A, and cost centre and activity carried from the production request into every generated document.

   Benefit: The company receives issue and sales overviews regularly, without compiling them by hand; a monthly duplicate-issue check flags documents entered twice. Raw-material, semi-finished and finished-goods movements post to the agreed accounts without manual work, and costs can be evaluated by cost centre.

5. Months 12–49

   More domestic and foreign chains

   Implementation itself: usually 1–2 weeks per chain; rest of the period: onboarding the chains one by one on their own schedules, coordination with the EDI provider, and test document exchanges

   Further retail chains connected step by step, including euro invoicing, delivery notes to each chain's requirements, SSCC pallet labels and new dispatch points at the external warehouse.

   Benefit: Once set up, each new chain runs in the same automatic mode as existing customers. Growing sales therefore needs no new manual workload for orders, invoices or delivery notes.

6. Months 15–21

   Several accounting units in one environment

   Implementation itself: 1–2 weeks in total; rest of the period: gradual extension to the further accounting unit and verification in operation on the client's side

   Nightly transfers and mutual invoicing between accounting units, and one production intranet for all of them.

   Benefit: Transfers of goods between accounting units and their invoicing are created automatically every night from production requests, so nobody has to trace and invoice them by hand. Production in all the accounting units works in one intranet.

7. Months 32–40

   ISDOC re-invoicing and recipe transfer

   Implementation itself: about 4–5 weeks in total; rest of the period: refining the specification, waiting for sample documents, the client preparing source documents and recipe data, and testing in live operation

   An uploaded supplier PDF invoice with embedded ISDOC becomes the received invoice, the stock cards and the issued invoice to the end customer; recipes were moved into POHODA from another information system.

   Benefit: Re-invoicing takes a single file upload instead of retyping two invoices, including the ARES customer lookup and duplicate protection. Recipes did not have to be created in POHODA by hand from scratch.

8. Month 33

   Over-consumption checks

   Implementation itself: within 1 week; rest of the period: tuning the alerts based on feedback from the client's live operation

   When actual consumption is booked, the system flags raw materials used beyond the recipe or bought at a higher price.

   Benefit: Deviations from the recipe and raw-material price increases are visible as soon as production is booked, so they can be dealt with in time rather than at a later review.

9. Months 42–47

   New production process and negative-stock correction

   Implementation itself: about 10 weeks in total; rest of the period: approval of the proposal, refining the rules with the client, the client closing each month's production and checking the results

   Raw-material consumption is recalculated from the quantity actually produced, production requests are loaded with barcode scanners, and negative stock is corrected in bulk day by day.

   Benefit: Consumption reflects actual production rather than the plan, and scanning replaces searching for and keying in requests. The system itself corrects negative stock on raw-material and production warehouses with transfers or issue notes, so stock records do not stay negative.

10. Months 44–48

    Attendance with terminals

    Implementation itself: about 6–8 weeks including building the terminals; rest of the period: refining the report requirements, and the client preparing cabling, domain groups and employee data

    An attendance system with chip terminals that we build ourselves, permissions managed through the domain, and reports of hours worked and meal vouchers.

    Benefit: Payroll inputs – hours worked, meal-voucher entitlements and absences – come straight from terminal records and are exported once a month. Permissions follow domain groups, so there is no separate user administration.

11. Month 52

    Reporting in the intranet

    Implementation itself: about 1–2 weeks; rest of the period: rolling it out to users and fine-tuning after first use on the client's side

    Receivables, payables and other management views from POHODA directly in the intranet.

    Benefit: Management has current receivables and payables available directly in the intranet, without having to export data from POHODA and process it in spreadsheets.