In Australia/New Zealand it’s hard to go into a supermarket without coming across a brand belonging to the Cerebos range of grocery products.

The leading Australian and New Zealand food and beverage manufacturer distributes and markets a wide range of premium grocery products including sauces, seasoning, dressing, salt and pepper, snacks, beverages, coffee, frozen products and food service products.

The organisation has turnover of approximately $315million and employs over 700 people.

“As Lawson provides our core ERP solution (Movex) it was a natural choice as a partner in enabling our e-business operations,” he said.

Lawson was selected to provide specialised e-business services creating a complete Business to Business (B2B) e-business environment. This will facilitate better communications with the company’s clients and will add value by providing important information via the Internet.

Mr Gordon says the future benefits of this integration will include online access to up-to-date information on stock availability, customer information, credit status, order status and online balances.

“The e-business solution will allow us to communicate on a system to system basis with our large retail clients who have their own ERP solution, further streamlining the EDI process. Through the use of XML we will be able to swap invoices, purchase orders and shipping notices directly with these clients, online.

“Lawson’s e-business solution will also allow our smaller customers to place orders directly with us via the Internet. We will be able to offer these clients who typically do not have ERP systems, additional customer service through access to account status enquiry facilities and sales statistics enquiry across the Internet,” he said.

In the future Cerebos anticipates its integrated e-business infrastructure will enable large retailers to forecast their own demand and communicate their requirements directly with Cerebos via the Internet.  Once this becomes reality throughout the supply chain, the company’s e-business infrastructure will enable its customers stock to be replenished based on actual consumer demand rather than by demand forecasting, also enabling optimum stocking levels. Indeed the company will be well positioned to move toward Efficient Consumer Response and Vendor Managed Inventory reaping the benefits that these processes enable.

“We are looking toward Europe with its a very mature supplier –customer relationships which actually represent enabled supply chains. Lawson has a key strength, being a software vendor originating in Sweden, being based in a very mature market when it comes to terms of trade relationships. We believe this experience will assist us in our aims to bring about a fully e-business enabled supply chain,” he said.