Winweb at IFFA - facing the future with AI support

Apps that make everyday work easier. A chatbot that helps the customer immediately. An excellent program for sales forecasting. Fast translations and spelling checks for all common languages. Automatic transfer of articles including prices to the web shop. The software company Winweb is presenting its developer know-how at IFFA: in hall 12.1, booth D01. 

Winweb Informationstechnologie GmbH has been developing industry-specific ERP software for the meat industry for more than 25 years and is presenting several Winweb apps at the IFFA. These are practical small applications that run on all modern browsers and any mobile device. The apps can be accessed a link or website address. "The users and their permissions are set up through the Winweb user management. Registration with Apple or Google is not necessary for this," said Willi von Berg, Winweb's managing director. 

The new user management app can also be used to access the contact details of customers, suppliers and business partners directly from winweb-food on the go. Thus, phone calls can be made and emails sent quickly from the app. Receipts and open transactions as well as customer and supplier-related activities can be accessed at any time. In addition, new activities can be created on the go. And if an appointment is scheduled, the relevant employee is notified of this via the internal messaging system. The workflow with approval processes will also be added soon. 

In the packaging app, the driver, who delivers E2 crates among other things, selects the receipts on his cell phone, sets the status of the crates at the customer's premises to "delivered" and has the customer sign for this in the app. Pictures are taken with a brief explanation attached. Collected packaging is also registered. During storage, the data are automatically forwarded to winweb-food in real time. The signature is added at the same time. "Packing slips are sent via e-mail. This eliminates the need for paper," informs von Berg. 

In the Winweb-QS app for internal quality control, data are recorded in the rooms to be checked. The results are recorded and saved even in rooms without internet, for example in the cold store. If there is a connection to the Internet, the data is immediately synchronized. Willi von Berg: "Recording data afterwards is not necessary. Test procedures printing and archiving and results and reports on paper are thus a thing of the past." 

Facing the future with AI 

 A chatbot was recently added to the ERP system winweb-food that answers all questions about Winweb and the software. "And that within a few seconds," says von Berg. Text translation will also be presented at IFFA: this allows, for example, label texts for customers in Italy to be automatically translated into Italian before printing. For this purpose, winweb-food features a context menu with which the text is translated into the desired language using AI. In the process, a spelling check can also be performed for all texts. 

Together with Maastricht University and Winweb customers, a method for predicting food sales figures was investigated. With this method, sales figures can be explained and predicting figures becomes more reliable and understandable. The practical application of AI in this way is unique, it sounds from Maastricht University. "The results are amazing and are much better than any previous attempts to predict sales figures," van Berg said. "By combining AI and expert knowledge, we can make predictions that are more precise and relevant to business processes." 

Everything automated: forwarding prices to the web shop 

Winweb provides interfaces for all common webshops. Thereby, for webshops of business customers, the pricing in winweb-food is used to automatically send the correct values to the webshop. For B2C shops, a customer number only has to be created once. Then the item data including prices used in the webshop are automatically entered. "Because of the automated process, data no longer needs to be recorded manually," explains van Berg. As soon as an order from a customer arrives, the order is processed, the order confirmation is automatically sent by e-mail and the goods are shipped as normal.