Gourmet Bakery has grown in just one year from a small cake supplier to supermarkets into a diversified producer with its own shops. Using Telema EDI has helped to scale up the business. Processing sales orders automatically saves them 7,5 hours a day, leaving time for more meaningful tasks. That is more than 200 saved hours a month.
Gourmet Bakery was established less than a year ago when an industry professional Andrejs Grigorjevs and his spouse Natālija Grigorjeva decided to fill a market niche. People in Latvia used to order custom baked goods from private bakers or bought trans fat rich cakes from the nearest supermarket. Finding baked goods from quality ingredients in an average supermarket was a challenge. This is where Gourmet Bakery stepped in – with the aim to provide high-quality cakes in retail chains.
In the beginning orders were received via phone and email with a dedicated data entry specialist filling in the order in a Word template. It took a whole working day to process around 50 orders, and, clearly, this was no way to go if the company wanted to grow.
Upon signing agreements with the first retail chains – Rimi and Mego – Gourmet Bakery looked into available supply chain automation options and established an EDI connection to those chains with the help of Telema Latvia. Now the orders from retail chains arrive electronically straight to enterprise resource planning system Accor Profi, where they can be converted to invoices and sent back to customers also in electronic format. Company’s co-founder Natalija Grigorjeva comments:
“Taking orders via Telema EDI is much more convenient and saves a lot of time. With Telema EDI we are able to process the workload that used to take us a day within half an hour. And all errors are eliminated!”
The company is now opening their own deli shops and e-commerce site (www.gourmetbakery.lv) and expanding the assortment with other baked goods. They are happy to have a partner like Telema that supports their growth and development of supply processes. When asked what their data entry colleague is doing now that Telema EDI takes a bulk of a workload away, Natalija responds cheerfully:
“There is always a lot to do in a small company like ours. Instead of routine data entry and printing out papers, the employee now helps with more value creating tasks”.
Today, Gourmet Bakery exchanges e-documents with nearly 400 shops all over Latvia. With monthly order volume over 2000, automating order handling is a definite competitive advantage.