Fresh Servant, a trusted supplier to retailers and professional kitchens, specializes in quality fresh food and a range of products that support wellbeing. With the data warehouse and reporting solution deployed with Pinja, the company is now able to manage its growing business in a resource-efficient and data-driven way.
Fresh Servant, a supplier of high-quality and tasty fresh food to professional kitchens and retailers, has grown over the years to become the market leader in its segment. The company is an advocate for a food revolution, and wants to make everyday plates more colorful. The best-known brands of the fast-growing and developing company are the Hetki salads and the SalaattiMestari salad bar.
Fresh Servant makes effective use of the digital solutions provided by Pinja to manage its business with determination and to run its daily operations. An important basis for reliable knowledge management is a properly built and easily scalable data warehouse, the building of which started in 2020.
The cooperation between Fresh Servant and Pinja started at the beginning of 2020. A data warehouse and Power BI reporting development project was launched to automate the compilation and processing of Fresh Servant’s business data into a format that enables more efficient use and analysis of the data. The aim was to translate the figures into information, and ultimately into action.
Demand and production planning was previously handled in Excel, but now, in a joint effort of Fresh Servant and Pinja, it has shifted to applications that work together with the ERP and the data warehouse. This has made planning work more versatile and easier to manage.
The latest area of collaboration between Fresh Servant and Pinja is the use of machine learning to predict sales. The forecasts introduced in fall 2022 have taken the forecasting work in a promising direction, already proving to be more accurate than forecasts produced by people and mathematical calculation in the testing phase.
It’s easy to trust Pinja’s expertise. Thanks to their industry expertise, cooperation has been smooth, even though they jumped onto a moving train.
When Fresh Servant, a supplier of tasty and healthy food to consumers and the HoReCa sector, first contacted digitalization specialist Pinja, the starting grounds were quite typical: there was a lot of business data available, but it was challenging to compile, process and thus use it.
– We had a lot of long-term data in our ERP system, for example. As our business grew, we created and edited reports in Excel, as I’m sure many others did. We wanted to streamline and diversify our reporting so that we could transform the figures into information and ultimately into action” says Carita Haapasalmi of Pegasso Oy, who leads Fresh Servant’s data and tool development.
For Fresh Servant, the customer always comes first, and the customer’s trust must be redeemed with every delivery. Delivering on the customer promise has become easier, as the current Power BI reports provide a wide range of tools for monitoring and analyzing, for example, sales and purchases, delivery reliability, the product freshness index, and production efficiency. An important cornerstone of the cooperation was the good knowledge of the industry among Pinjans.
– It’s easy to trust Pinja’s expertise. Thanks to their industry expertise, cooperation has been smooth, even though they jumped onto a moving train. They also often present alternative ways of doing the same thing, and have also been able to say if they don’t know something right away, but will come back to it, says Haapasalmi.
Fresh Servant’s business has grown strongly throughout the partnership, so the data warehouse built with Pinja and the enhanced reporting it has provided has not only supported the company’s growth, but also helped enable it. Important areas include production, personnel and demand planning, for which Juha Tiitto, Head of Planning and Steering at Fresh Servant, is responsible.
– Cooperation with Pinja has worked well all along. For example, although the production planning is a huge task, the work has been pleasant and easy. We have made progress in suitably small steps, says Tiitto.
The latest area of collaboration between Fresh Servant and Pinja is the use of machine learning to predict sales. Initially, Fresh Servant used people to do it, then mathematical formulae based on previous year’s sales figures. The development project introduced machine learning, and the forecasts introduced in fall 2022 have taken the forecasting work in a very promising direction. Demand forecasts already proved to be more accurate than those produced by hand and mathematical calculations during the testing phase.
The payback period for development projects related to the management of business-critical data varies slightly depending on the calculation method, according to Fresh Servant.
– Some of the tools have paid for themselves very quickly. As the development work has been done for our own needs, it has already brought practical benefits to our work during the project, says Haapasalmi.
Image: Fresh Servant
EUR 81M turnover in 2022
500 employees from nearly 40 countries in 2022
100 % Finnish work, in three locations
Expert services in knowledge management of all sectors.
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