Baking & Snack - May 2019 - 127

DISTRIBUTION
Route Accounting

Kill the CHAOS
Automatic production scheduling and order fulfillment technology
remove the panic from the last stage of an operation.
by Nico Roesler

A phone rings. A retailer is short on product and eager
to let someone hear it. The questions and accusations
start flying. Chaos sets in.
This is the baker's distribution nightmare. But it can
be avoided with today's advanced distribution systems.
Through automation, bakers can easily track shipment
and delivery from beginning to end and, if there's an issue, provide customers with process schedules and order
fulfillment data.

Synced from the start
Production scheduling is critically linked to order fulfillment, especially when order volumes change day to day.
Eric VandenBerg, director of customer solutions and
product marketing for Harvest Food Solutions, said one
of the biggest challenges with fulfillment and production
involves forecasting. It's crucial to maintain proper inventory needed to prepare for upcoming sales, promos,
new product releases, weather events and holidays.
In many cases, he said, bakers admit there is a constant
battle between what sales wants and what production can
make. "This battle usually leads to over-or-under production," Mr. VandenBerg said. "In either case, you never want
to run out of ingredients or packaging. That means you pay
for expedited shipments, or, worse, you stop production."
Harvest Food Solutions offers an application tailored
to bakers' daily needs. Its scheduling model is designed
to accommodate the high volume, batch processing and
fast-paced environment that bakeries demand.
From the start, bakers should be able to focus on customer service. Marc Braun, president of Pcdata USA, said

bakers compete in the market in part by staying agile when
it comes to order fulfillment and customer service. "That
translates into their customers being able to order very late;
up until they're supposed to be getting their order, they can
make pretty significant changes," Mr. Braun explained.
Pick to Light is Pcdata's solution for bakeries that fill
complicated orders for a large range of delivery points and
with any number of SKUs. Pcdata also created technology
that automatically scans picked orders as they get moved.
If a product is loaded onto the wrong truck or into the incorrect freezer, an alarm sounds. "Certainly, in the beginning when we upgrade bakeries, we hear these alarms go
off all the time," Mr. Braun said. "When they try to load a
stack onto it, but that's not the truck where it's going. You
can correct the situation and load it onto the right truck."
Then, once a delivery truck is loaded, operators have
an automatically generated load manifest with details
about everything on that vehicle. He said this eliminates
human transcription errors on paper, and operators
know exactly what's going where.

Route accounting systems that
use clear color-coded displays
can prevent errors before they
occur, such as shipping a product to the wrong customer.
Pcdata USA

Closing the loop
One key aspect to creating traceability across a bakery is
scalable technology that works cooperatively with other
parts of the operation. Each system in a bakery can run independently but still integrate, Mr. VandenBerg said.
Harvest Exchange, or HeX moves data, migrates legacy
systems and interconnects systems into the Harvest Cloud
network. Cloud applications provide access to data anytime,
anyplace. Mr. VandenBerg explained that this technology
opens the door to seamless and secure unification of an

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