Johannesburg, 03 Nov 2017
There is a real opportunity for South African abattoirs to evolve and grow their businesses by adopting the right business management technology. A rapidly expanding local abattoir and meat wholesaler is reaping the rewards of implementing an Enterprise Resource Planning Solution (ERP) to streamline their business processes. Since adopting the SAP Business One Abattoir solution, Ramburg Beef processes about 50% more heads of cattle daily, while reducing the overall time to process entries or make manual adjustments.
Clyde Langenberg, Financial Manager of Ramburg Beef, said "the return on investment was clear when measuring the speed and precision of the production process, combined with new controls and real-time reporting we now have in place".
According to Langenberg, Ramburg Beef wanted to find a solution to address the risks associated with four of their business challenges. Firstly, there was no integration between their Payroll and General Ledger, which meant that time-consuming manual capturing was required. Secondly, multiple units of measure were used. Incorrect pricing could hurt relationships with clients and incorrect units of measure could change the product price per line item. Thirdly, the reports on production output were dependent on manual capturing and did not reflect up-to-the-minute information. This posed a greater risk for human error, and clients could miss pieces of pertinent information by having to sift through large reports. Lastly, being unable to track at what stage a production order was, and how long it has been at a specific stage could affect the output of the production process.
With the help of the SAP Business One Abattoir solution provided by Bluekey Seidor, the Payroll and General Ledger aspects of the business were integrated and all postings to ledgers were automated.
To improve the units of measure and pricing, a warehouse and inventory management solution was implemented which meant that inventory could now be managed using various costing models, while maintaining the master data.
To improve reporting on the output of workstations, a completely integrated solution was implemented to provide a real-time, bird's-eye view of KPI's.
A specific abattoir modular solution was implemented to address the lack of production stage tracking. Individual animals' ear tags are linked to a unique serial number and a tag with the same serial number is firmly attached to the carcass to link it back to that specific farmer or feedlot. This stored data provides a complete timeline for every carcass which includes slaughter and dispatch time, right through to deboning.
Converting to the integrated business management solution had some initial challenges for the company, as it required a complete mind-shift among the entire workforce. There were also some hardware constraints, but Bluekey Seidor worked alongside Ramburg Beef to overcome these.
Langenberg said looking at the cost implications of not having these processes, it quickly became clear that the business had made the right decision. The abattoir now has the ability to accurately track all products and batches to provide a better service to their retail stores and local butchers.
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