Success Story - Lienig

The special position of Lienig Wildfrucht in the food industry is a result of the specific product portfolio that Lienig Wildfrucht offers based on its own development work and continuous innovation. Thus, Lienig Wildfrucht is continuously engaged in optimizing its own processes and using the necessary modern technology to do so.

Throughout the company's history, innovations have been primarily geared to the company's purpose, which is the provision of wild and special fruits and their processing products and their procurement, processing and delivery. For this reason, the expansions were primarily in the area of machine and processing technology and the associated processes. Up to now, innovations in the software and systems for corporate management have only been made to the extent absolutely necessary.

With this in mind, Lienig Wildfrucht has so far only used standard software for order entry, production planning and the procurement of raw and basic materials. The company has met the increased demands of its customers by being certified according to common industrial standards (e.g. ISO 9000ff.) and has introduced common food processing standards (e.g. HACCP).

In order to meet the future requirements of integrated corporate management, Lienig Wildfrucht has started a continuous process of introducing company-specific software in order to fundamentally redesign the entire corporate management, planning, execution and accounting of value-added processes with the help of state-of-the-art digital technologies.

We - manaTec GmbH - faced this challenge together with Lienig Wildfrucht within the scope of a consulting project for the digitalization of business processes. Within the consulting project we checked the processes on the basis of their professional or technical relevance and their digitizability. In a joint process of manaTec and Lienig Wildfrucht, the individual processes and process steps were discussed with the technical managers at Lienig Wildfrucht. The individual processes and process steps were recorded by manaTec with the creation of process flow maps and prepared for a future implementation in a digitization project.

Our advice also aimed to outline alternative illustrations and approaches to the processes. To determine the need for a digitization solution, all digital and not yet digitized processes within the Lienig Wildfrucht were analyzed.

In addition to direct value-added processes, we also looked at support and administrative processes such as personnel administration or master data management. The processes were examined with regard to their individual steps, persons involved, systems and documents used, legal requirements, input and output data.

Due to the diversity of processes and the need to use the same master data continuously, it has been shown that a future ERP system to be selected must be able to map a wide range of different business processes. In order to map the needs of food processing and the special features of Lienig Wildfrucht within the processes, as well as to enable the connection of the external systems involved in the process, our logical recommendation was to implement an open source ERP system. In order to make the accessibility of the system as barrier-free as possible, the advantages of a system that allows web-based use for the user are obvious. Only a modern browser is required to operate such a system.

As a special challenge in the environment of the food processing industry, the ERP system must not only map processes in general administration, manufacturing/production, quality management and warehousing, but also be able to track batches, keep an eye on best-before dates and map ongoing controls that ensure the necessary certifications are obtained. With regard to Industry 4.0, the ERP system should also be able to connect measuring devices for production and quality management in the future.

Based on these requirements, the ERP system Odoo can be used as a clear favorite for the implementation of digitization at Lienig Wildfrucht. With the large number of modules available in the standard version and the numerous additional apps, Odoo can directly map most processes, adapt already implemented processes, develop completely new processes and connect external systems partially or fully automated. Further factors for the decision to use Odoo are the worldwide community of several million users and the network of a large number of implementation partners in the DACH region, which always gives Lienig Wildfrucht the opportunity to find providers and partners for the continuous development of the system.

As a result of the consultation, we clearly recommended the implementation of the ERP system Odoo. Finally, we analyzed how an implementation within the existing system landscape could be iterative. The implementation of Odoo is planned for the next two years. The goal of the implementation is to successively map all processes within the Lienig Wildfrucht in the system as various milestones are reached, to replace the heterogeneous landscape of standard software and to replace manual data transfer processes with automatic interfaces.

By mapping all processes in one system, the general data quality is improved, the process reliability is increased and last but not least the training of new colleagues is simplified. By choosing the modern ERP system Odoo, Lienig Wildfrucht also has new channels for internal and external communication with customers and suppliers.

By creating digitality, we put Lienig Wildfrucht in a position to react quickly to future new requirements from the market, from regulatory bodies or through our own expansion plans, and to guarantee the safety of processes and products in the accustomed quality.

We are very pleased that we have successfully completed the consulting project together with Lienig Wildfrucht and look forward to the future with great anticipation in order to master the implementation project hand in hand.