Company
Dairy Crest presently has 21
manufacturing sites and employs approximately 9,000 people. The company
serves both the retail grocery trade and major food manufacturers and has
leading positions in all sectors within the dairy market.
Because of the nature of Dairy Crest’s business, they required the
capability to print formatted despatch notes and picking notes at many of
their UK based manufacturing and distribution sites.
In many cases, despatch documents have to be produced in special formats for
particular customers. At Dairy Crest we make a point of Out-sourcing’
the support of all of the IT functions that are not directly concerned with
the day to day manufacture and distribution of our products.
Says Bernard Rubin Dairy Crests Applications Support Manager, "Our recent
acquisition of the cheese & milk business from Unigate has placed even more
pressure on our internal resources, especially as we integrate the ex
Unigate sites into our JBA manufacturing process". Bernard continues, "We
took the decision to move to FDI Technology's new SabreFDI product because
it was more cost effective to expand over our growing WAN, than the previous
print formatting product we had used". "The page consolidation features are
a bonus when comes to reducing the amount of network traffic and some of the
new design tool features enable us to make the picking documents easier to
read".
Implementation
Finally Bernard comments "We have used FDI implementation service for most
of the work, however, as the tools are so easy to use our own team are able
to implement changes to the application if we wish. We also benefit from FDI's 24 hour hotline support service".
Dairy Crest has also implemented, FDI, SabreArc data archiving system. This
system in conjunction with SabreFDI formatted printing is being used to
format and produce all the groups non EDI invoices and credits. Use of this
system has also allowed them to implement new features such as fax and
e-mail from archive, multiple documents sorted and printed in customer order
and the possibility of Internet access to the archived files by more users
in the Dairy Crest group of companies and perhaps even major customers.
There are also moves within the organisation to investigate and implement a
POD scanning system in a number of the larger UK sites, FDI are well placed
to offer this facility. |
