Tasty Fresh Transforms Picking, Stocktake and Supply Chain Operations with Dematic Voice Solution

Tasty Fresh Foods Co is an Australian business success story. A company that originated from humble beginnings more than four decades ago, today Tasty Fresh delivers fresh and hot food, snacks and drinks right to the door of workplaces daily in Melbourne, Perth, Sydney, Newcastle and Queensland.

“Tasty Fresh Food Co is a national business that started back in 1979,” explained Colin Lear, Founding Director at Tasty Fresh Food Co. “We have six outlets across four states and service around 35,000 customers per day from around 153 vans. We produce around 60,000 units per day from our facilities and we handle around a 100,000 units per day.

“Our service is provided every business day of the year and we have over 500 employees around Australia that make that happen.”

Automating Tasty Fresh Food Co’s supply chain

“Today, many small and medium businesses still use manual methods to carry out the majority of tasks within the supply chain, as well as scanners and other technologies, which are not centrally connected, not to mention extremely time consuming,” said Rob Deane, Southern Regional Sales Manager at Dematic.

“As customer expectations continue to rise, product delivery becomes increasingly demanding, and supply chains are under more pressure than ever before to pick and pack products quicker and more accurately.”

Tasty Fresh approached Dematic to move from a manual way of tracing stock with paper and tablets to a more automated and centralised solution for its supply chain, which would deliver much higher efficiency, productivity and accuracy.

“Tasty Fresh’s stock taking processes previously involved each individual Van Sales Manager doing a stock take on each individual SKU on our vans,” explained Adam Van Bergen, National Operations Manager at Tasty Fresh Food Co. “With so many people counting so many SKUs, accurately managing stock was a real challenge.”

Finding the right solution for Tasty Fresh

For Dematic, the first step in finding the right supply chain solution for Tasty Fresh Food Co was going on site and learning about the business. It was crucial that a clear understanding of the business’ current processes and the key outcomes they were seeking to achieve was developed.

“We were instantly impressed that Dematic wanted to understand our operations, and that they came through our facility multiple times,” added Van Bergen. “Dematic understanding and not just telling us what we wanted to hear was a big reason why we chose to partner with them.”

A key focus of the project was to be able to provide data back to Tasty Fresh Food Co for inventory and reporting purposes. A Honeywell Dematic Real Time Logistics Voice on Android solution was selected as the best system to meet the needs of Tasty Fresh.

Honeywell Voice is a seamless, paperless, and hands-free, eyes up solution. Using the solution, workers are guided through a workflow using a mobile device and voice headset, with inputs from voice and scanning automatically sent back to Tasty Fresh Food Co’s central supply chain system. This includes data gathered through anything from order-picking, to replenishment and stocktake.

Voice technology can also scale to suit changing business requirements, while empowering management with greater control, flexibility and visibility over the supply chain.

The strong collaboration between the project team members meant the Voice project was delivered seamlessly on time and within Budget.

“My favourite part of the Voice technology is the traceability, the ease of use, and the support we get from Honeywell and Dematic,” said Van Bergen. “I definitely recommend Voice to any business that wanted to look at it.”

How Voice improves operational efficiency for Tasty Fresh

“The Voice solution was deployed at each Tasty Fresh depot,” said Deane. “The two primary Voice workflows that were implemented were pick to trolley and van loading.”

Under the Voice system the Tasty Fresh team member is advised which food or drink product SKUs and quantities are to be loaded onto each trolley. When completed, they proceed to van loading. The team member is then instructed, per van ID, which SKUs and associated quantities are to be replenished into each van in SKU sequence.

Product shorts, overfills and audit are all tracked simultaneously, saving workers the time spent having to go back and forth doing these tasks separately. This helps Tasty Fresh to check expected stock from point-of-sale deductions versus physical van replenishment, all through the one Voice technology process.

“The Voice system tells us what to load inside the vans, and also it tells the system how many we are loading,” said Aline, Brisbane Warehouse Manager at Tasty Fresh Food Co. “This means that at the same time that we are loading, we are also doing the stock take. It’s a great system which gives us the flexibility to make sure that our stock is right by generating reports to check our sales match with the stock being loaded in the vans.”

The impact of Voice for Tasty Fresh

Some of the key benefits that the Voice solution has provided to Tasty Fresh are all about management of inventory and providing traceability of that inventory.

Increased productivity – Voice technology delivers up to a 35% productivity improvement from legacy systems, through allowing workers’ hands to always be free to pick products and complete all warehouse tasks.

“Voice has improved productivity across the business,” said Van Bergen. “Instead of having 157 people stocktaking, we now only have 20-25.

“We're saving between five and 10 minutes a day per van sales manager. That might not sound like a big deal, but five to 10 minutes across 170 employees a day is quite a cost saving.”

Enhanced employee satisfaction and safety – Heightened worker productivity with voice guidance makes the employees’ roles more intuitive and focused, resulting in less errors and better worker satisfaction.

“It's great to have our hands-free, with no paper,” said Mirlla, Brisbane Warehouse, Tasty Fresh Food Co. “Instead, I'm able to use my hands to do the job quicker. It's also safer because I don't have to be holding the paper while handling the food and drink products.”

Empowering management – Voice technology offers management greater visibility, control and flexibility over supply chain operations.

“The Voice technology makes my job a lot easier because I'm able to easily trace where stock's going, what stock's doing. Before, I would have to sift through hours of data just to find what I needed,” said Van Bergen.

Improved accuracy – With eyes always focused on the job, workers are able to quickly find, pick and pack the right products, reducing errors by up to 50%. Additionally, automated stocktake has also reduced not only time, but also errors through manual counting.

Ease of worker training – The Voice solution is extremely easy and intuitive to train workers on, particularly when used on the Android platform which is familiar to most people.

“The training for the Voice system is exceptionally easy. We're able to train new staff up within half an hour,” added Van Bergen. “And the feedback from staff is that it’s great, that it’s easy to use, and any problems that arise Honeywell and Dematic fix it within 24 hours.”

Integrated bundle solution – Voice solutions are a simple bundle offering including hardware, headset, the application, and licencing for an easy purchase, deployment, and support guideline.

Enhanced customer service – Improved supply chain efficiencies, productivity and accuracy flow on to benefit the end customers.

“Every change we make in our business, it's always about how will this affect the customer? The move to Voice is giving us a better opportunity to satisfy our customer by picking the correct product,” said Lear.

An additional benefit of the Voice system for Tasty Fresh Food Co, has been the ability to re-deploy staff to more productive tasks.

Expanding Voice usage across new business areas

Due to the success of the Voice solution rollout at Tasty Fresh Food Co, the company is looking to roll out many more applications - from confectionary picking and production picking right through to its fleet of food vans and all other areas of the business.

“It's been a terrific partnership with Dematic. That's why we want to look to take it as far as we can in our business where everything that's handled and picked, Voice and the Dematic system will take care of it for us,” said Lear.