Schaumburg, IL August 19, 2002 When eight out of 10 hot dog vendors in as carnivorous a city as Chicago sell your products, it's not enough just to ask, "Where's the beef?"
You also have to ask how many hot dogs you have in stock, where the next batch of frankfurter ingredients is coming from and how much you owe your suppliers.
So it's not surprising that Vienna Beef, which said that more than 80 percent of Chicago's hot dog vendors sell the company's "Original Chicago-Style Hot Dog," has tapped into modern technology to help manage the production of its venerable pure beef franks, which debuted at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893.
Vienna Beef has gone live with integrated accounts payable, procurement, inventory and warehouse management applications in a food industry solution from software company Intentia.
The phased implementation began in December 2001 at Vienna Beef's corporate headquarters and manufacturing plant in Chicago, Ill. The company runs version 12 of Intentia's Movex Food & Beverage enterprise suite on an IBM iSeries/400 platform.
"This initial implementation of Movex went very well," reported Rick Ewert, senior vice president and director of procurement for Vienna Beef.
Ewert, who is executive sponsor for the technology project, said the company already had begun realizing efficiency benefits from the integrated system. "And we anticipate increasing improvements, both near-term and long-term, especially in our procurement process," Ewert added.
Over time, Vienna Beef also plans to evaluate the collaborative and supply chain functionality of the Movex suite, with the overall goal of improving productivity throughout all areas of the firm.
