Premier Foods to implement a Zetes Track & Trace solution integrated with SAP

Published 8th September 2009

8th September 2009

Zetes (Euronext Brussels: ZTS), the international leader in the solutions and services industry for automatic identification of goods and people, has won a significant contract with Premier Foods, United Kingdom’s largest food producer. Under the terms of this contract, Zetes will provide a traceability solution to improve the manufacturing and distribution processes of the company’s Hovis Division, which produces 2 million loaves of bread every day. If fully implemented after a successful pilot phase, Zetes’ solution will enhance Premier’s SAP warehouse management solution with the integration of over 500 barcode scanning devices to track and trace the movement of goods across Hovis’ manufacturing and distribution centres.

Zetes completed the integration of mobile devices with Premier’s SAP system using its SAP toolkit, MiNetConnect. As a rapid application development solution, MiNetConnect provides a direct link between SAP and mobile or fixed scanning devices to capture, validate, and process transactions faster, in real-time and with increased accuracy and system reliability.

For the Premier Foods project, Zetes has also developed an additional component that enables the SAP system to receive data from fixed scanners. Zetes’ capability to complete a direct integration with SAP was a key requirement for Premier, because this ensured both that a technically complex project could be simplified as much as possible and minimized the numbers of suppliers involved.

Currently, scanners have been installed in three facilities to ensure that automated processes can be implemented to enable business controls, product visibility and traceability across the supply chain, at the same time as maintaining responsiveness to time-critical events. Subject to the success of the initial pilot phase, Hovis will consider a full roll out of the traceability solution to all 23 of its UK sites during 2010.

“We are pleased to be working with Zetes and look forward to continuing our relationship with the roll out of what will be a transformational project,” says Phil McCallum, IT and Infrastructure Director at Premier Foods. “The traceability solution we are piloting with Zetes will, we hope, solve long standing issues our company has faced within the Hovis bakery supply chain.”

James Hannay, VP of Northern Europe for Zetes commented, “Improved traceability is important for Premier on many levels, enabling better management of product supply into the marketplace and more accurate stock replenishment. This translates into a better service to retailers and greater consumer satisfaction.”

This project will contribute to the objectives announced for 2009 for the Zetes Group.



About Zetes

ZETES INDUSTRIES (Euronext Brussels: ZTS) is a leading pan-European company in the sector of value-added solutions and services for the automatic identification of goods and people (Goods ID and People ID). These solutions use mature and emerging technologies (bar codes, voice recognition, RFID, smart cards, biometry) and “Solution Architecture Frameworks” to optimise the performance of the activities of private and public clients in many sectors of the market.

Zetes solutions are implemented in many areas of activity: manufacturing, transport, logistics, distribution, health care, finance, telecommunications and public services. The Zetes Group, whose registered office is in Brussels, has subsidiaries in Belgium, Germany, Denmark, France, Ireland, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK. Zetes at present has more than 800 employees and achieved a consolidated turnover of 178 million Euros in 2008. For more info, go to www.zetes.com.



ENDS


For further information please contact:

Lesley Muir, Good Public Relations, Email: lesley@good-pr.co.uk or Tel: 07796 148400