Kathrine Andersen Chocolate has moved into brand new and modern premises in Soeften northwest of Aarhus. The production facilities have been upgraded significantly and, at the same time, the production planning has been fully digitized with barcodes, production numbers, digital overview and registration of all processes.
Since 2007, director and business owner, Jakob Skovsgaard, has been head of the chocolate producer in East Jutland, Kathrine Andersen Chocolate, whose name dates to 1877 where Kathrine Andersen was born. The chocolate factory was established in 1898 when Kathrine Andersen started selling confectionery and cakes from her private home.
With more than 120 years of history, Jakob Skovsgaard is not only at the forefront of Denmark's oldest chocolate factory, but also brand-new premises and modern production facilities with associated chocolate shop.
From the very beginning, Jakob Skovsgaard learned the traditional chocolate skills, when he deliberately started from the bottom, learning from the former owner, Henrik Larsens. Henrik Larsen had many of the old recipes in his head. In this way, Jakob Skovsgaard was able to maintain respect for the traditional work.
Today, there is still a respect for the work and story about Kathrine Andersen Chocolate, which the new logo also symbolizes with a woman looking back in time.
But Jakob Skovsgaard is also a good businessman, and therefore it does not affect him emotionally if a chocolate type no longer sells and therefore has to be discontinued. Jakob Skovsgaard has always focused on creating organic growth, ensuring product development and most recently digitizing the entire planning from procurement to production and ordering system.
- Good planning is important. It is all about creating overview and making tasks clear for the staff when they start the day, says Jakob Skovsgaard.
Many of Kathrine Andersen Chocolate's processes are based on the basic principles of lean. Therefore, they have previously worked with boards and card systems, which now have been digitized through a collaboration with the ERP supplier, Scanditek and the IT company, Delfi Technologies.
- We have digitized our entire production planning through the implementation of a digital dashboard, an overview that is constantly updated and shows how far we are in the processes when it comes to production and packaging, explains Jakob Skovsgaard.
To make tasks visible to the staff, two screens have been mounted in the production and packaging department, which present the most important information to the staff with a digital overview of tasks and work processes on daily basis. Tablets, scanners, and printers have also been connected to the solution, which all are fed with data from the company's ERP system.
- We can control all processes down to the individual user level via tablets, where we can initiate and pause tasks. Digitization helps to make our processes more visible and provides the necessary overview to the staff, Jakob Skovsgaard concludes.
As an additional element of the digital production, Kathrine Andersen Chocolate also purchasing of records raw material and consumption using scanners (model: Delfi PM66). Printing labels to the warehouse is also possible with a label printer (model: Citizen CL-S521 label printer).
When raw materials are taken from the warehouse for production, the barcode of the product is being scanned so that the specific consumption can be recorded. Scanning take place again when production is complete and ready to be registered to the inventory. A final scan occurs when the chocolate needs to be registered on a sales order.
Kathrine Andersen Chocolate has for more than 12 years worked closely with Scanditek on the ERP side and most recently with the digitization project in collaboration with Delfi Technologies.
Kathrine Andersen Chokolade is Denmark's oldest chocolate factory, established in Aarhus in 1898 by Kathrine Andersen, who started selling confectionery and cakes from her private home. In 2007, Jakob Skovsgaard took over the company and started the work to make Kathrine Andersen Chocolate what it is today, namely a chocolate factory with respect for the old traditions.
Scanditek is a full-service IT partner that helps companies and public institutions with the right IT solutions. Scanditek has more than 20 years of experience and specializes in ERP / financial systems as well as network solutions. For many clients, Scanditek acts as their external IT department.
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