Application Description
EFKO is a company name familiar with Austrians whether they are housewives, farmers, or in other professions. EFKO began harvesting and manufacturing high quality food products in 1941, and since the 1950's have naturally preserved the products which has allowed them to grow into Austria's number one distributor of fruits and vegetables, especially pickles where they command a 32% market share.
The business, which is a cooperative, is located in the Eferding valley in Austria, one of the most fertile of all Austrian landscapes, and besides battling the natural environment every year to insure their products are the best available, now EFKO struggles with maintaining and slowly growing their share in what is an extremely competitive marketplace.
Recently, SAMAC Austria called on them and introduced them to the MIT/400 product for Data Warehousing on the AS/400. Since they were using an AS/400 with the IGS software package, they were interested, but sceptical about the telemarketer's claims. Nevertheless, they agreed to allow SAMAC to come out to Eferding, install MIT/400 on their system and demonstrate with their own data exactly what it could do.
The AS/400 320 system was already running on 86% of capacity, and a new AS/400 RISC system, a 53S was in the planning stages. The installation was done in less than a day, after which a presentation was made for the Managing Director Mr. Franz Windischbauer, who said after 5 minutes, " I'll buy it!".
Now another week's worth of work was scheduled and completed in which data models were built, the Data Warehouse was loaded, reports structured, and a happy AS/400 Data Warehouse user was up and running. I interviewed Ms. Roswitha Hackl, the DP Manager, who said that EFKO is now using the product to understand sales by product, by distributor, by store, and that she and Mr. Windischbauer, look for anomalies that indicate that one of their 5 key competitors is making inroads against their product line, either by product,by distribution area, or by outlet.
Ms. Hackl stated that not only is she now able to react quickly enough to prevent any major competitive damage, but she is also able to share the sales results and trends with her distribution network. Before they installed MIT/400 they had access to only limited sales data, but now they have loaded 5 years of data on their system, compared to only 2 years of active data before.
Customer Requirements
EFKO has a 15 month planning cycle, so it was critical that they could view enough data to observe and plan for trends in order to allow them to react quickly to changes in the market as well as environmental changes. The company has a couple of critical success factors, one is their policy of delivering only the highest quality foods to the consumer, resulting in their policy of „pick and process" within the same day. The other key element is that they should never run out of stock items for their distributors. Given the fickle nature of the weather, this can become an issue as the harvest season comes closer.
Follow Up Business
Rather than waiting for 1997, EFKO asked SAMAC to call IBM Austria and ask that they ship and install EFKO's 53S in 1996. Installation was done before year's end.
Distinguishing Factors
Ease of use of the queries, and easy to understand teh results. In this installation, SAMAC's MIT/400 provided a set of queries and spreadsheet reports that allowed the customer to view their sales data quickly and from a historical base twice as large as previously available. This allowed Ms. Hackl and her staff to focus on other IS needs rather than trying to get this data with normal query requests. We offered EFKO an economical and quick solution to their problems.
Value to the Customer
Ms. Hackl, the IS Manager, told me "Of course, I would recommend MIT/400 to anyone, anytime for any application like ours, no matter what you use it for, Finances, Personnel work, it's great". In addition she added, "even though we had reports from IBM and IGS, I would go to MIT/400 for my reports from now on."
Not a PC fan, she never accepted one, but having seen what the AS/400 and MIT/400 can do she has now ordered a PC, but she still says "I would rather purchase more licenses from SAMAC".