Farm Dairy supplies milk, custard and yogurt products which can be found in the refrigerated section of supermarkets. Every year, 200 million kilograms of sustainable milk is processed at the factory in Lelystad. All the milk comes from Dutch cows from farms where the cows graze in the fields from spring until autumn at least 120 days a year, at least 6 hours a day. The farmers’ milk is processed the same day. Partly because of this, lots of attention is paid to improving efficiency, and automation and digitization certainly contribute to this.
ULTIMO, EXACT GLOBE AND IMAGECAPTURE
We talk to Michael Sterenberg, who has been responsible for finance and IT at Farm Dairy since 2008, and Anneke Wessel, who works in the finance administration department at Farm Dairy and is a direct user of ImageCapture in combination with Ultimo and Exact Globe.
We receive 6600 invoices a year from our suppliers. About half of those are commodity invoices. We have been processing these automatically in our ERP system via ImageCapture for some time now. In addition to this, about 30% of all invoices relate to maintenance, repairs and expansions of our machines and installations in the factory. Our technical department is responsible for the orders, which are given to various parties to carry out work or order materials. They register these facility matters in the Assett Management software Ultimo. The process was still entirely manual: the invoice arrived, was entered in Exact and then the technical services employee had to approve it and staple the packing slip or service slip to the paper invoice. Everything then had to be scanned by the administration. A laborious process that is often not a top priority for engineers and gives the financial department little to no insight into the invoices received and their status.
MORE EFFICIENCY THROUGH INTEGRATION WITH ULTIMO
About two years ago, Farm Dairy decided that this process needed to be more efficient, explains Michael Sterenberg.
We have been using Exact for years and we know the various parties with whom Exact collaborates. That’s why we quickly ended up at Scan Sys. ImageCapture has a lot of links to various systems, but at that time there was no link to Ultimo. However, Director Maarten Terlingen immediately saw opportunities for realizing such a link. We worked very closely together on developing the link. The fact that we were the first customer with Ultimo, Exact and ImageCapture had the advantage that we were able to clearly indicate what we needed. We were listened to very carefully.
INVOICE FLOW UNDER CONTROL AND INSIGHT INTO COSTS
Colleague Anneke Wessel is also very happy with the combination of Ultimo, Exact and ImageCapture:
Now we actually know where an invoice is within the organization. Because our technical staff are sometimes very busy or don’t know exactly when an order will arrive or a service will be carried out, we sometimes have to wait until the goods have been received. It would be great if we could improve that process even more, but all in all we now have the invoice flow under control.
QUICK ACCESS TO ALL DOCUMENTS
Michael adds:
In addition to the faster digital processing of invoices and more insight into invoice status, this implementation of Ultimo, Exact and ImageCapture has greatly reduced paper flow, and our technical services staff have much more insight. They can access all the underlying documents with just a few clicks. Previously, they had to actually go to the administration. Having all the documents available this easily is also very useful during an audit. The auditor often asks about the underlying documents, and this is now very easy to provide with ImageCapture.
