Amersfoort, The Netherlands—Dec. 4, 2012—Descartes Systems Group, which globally provides on-demand, software-as-a-service solutions, helped Bake Five improve its retail supply operations with the Descartes Messaging Gateway service.
A consortium of industrial bakeries providing more than 26 percent of the Netherland's fresh bread products, Bake Five thrives on its core business to deliver fresh bread to supermarkets daily. It supplies over 1,300 locations in the Netherlands with fresh bread and pastries daily.
“Electronic information exchange between Bake Five headquarters, our 15 participating bakeries and our customers continues to increase in complexity in response to market requirements,” said John Korse, ICT Manager ICT at Bake Five.”From an operational and customer service perspective, it's critical for this process to run flawlessly. We selected Descartes' Messaging Gateway service to do just that. Descartes responds quickly and proactively to our needs. This is exactly what we are looking for in terms of our own customer relations and has helped the technology partnership with Descartes become ever stronger.”
Bake Five manages all the information—such as orders, packing slips and invoices—that circulates between the various retailers and bakeries. To streamline operations, the required electronic communication and related business processes are completely outsourced to Descartes. Transmission and translation of all messages are centrally managed in Descartes' cloud-based environment that is proactively monitored 24/7. Messages are not only sent directly to single bakeries but are also exchanged among the bakeries so that their production capacity is at an optimum level and, in turn, retailers are guaranteed fresh bread on their shelves.
“It's wonderful to see the collaboration with Bake Five grow into a completely ‘hands-free’ electronic communications with our integration-as-a-service platform," said Fred van der Heide, Vice President of Product Strategy at Descartes. “Bake Five's successes have driven us to enhance the quality and reliability of our own services. Our expertise in streamlining communications between retailers and suppliers has enabled us to enhance our offering with solutions that automate and standardize critical processes to help make this community more effective and efficient. We're pleased with the success we have been able to help Bake Five achieve and look forward to continuing to help them grow.”
