At Van Gelder Groenten en Fruit, operations continue 24 hours a day. “Our 350 employees work in shifts,” says Van Kouwen. He is responsible for the internal processes at Van Gelder. “Customers can place an order at 10:00 p.m. that we’ll deliver the next morning at 5:00 a.m. That short turnaround time has a major impact on our internal organization. The ordering process can only begin once the customer places an order. We’re fully geared toward that. That means our systems must be so well-equipped that they’re always available. We synchronize inventory levels nearly every five minutes, and our buyers each have their own product group that they monitor continuously. This way, any spike or dip in the product range or in supply and demand is immediately detected and relayed to the suppliers, ensuring that everything arrives and is delivered exactly on time.”
Van Gelder supplies not only fresh produce such as cucumbers and tomatoes but also processed products such as salads, raw vegetable platters, snack fruit, and smoothies. Van Kouwen: “Customers choose us because we offer a wide assortment, always Grade 1 quality, and fresh daily. We source our vegetables in bulk from all over the world, process them here, and supply them to our customers in the foodservice market. This includes hotels, caterers, snack bars, and restaurants, as well as the Senate and House of Representatives.”
Van Gelder is a growing company, and over the years they noticed that they were spending more and more time processing incoming invoices. Van Kouwen: “Posting incoming goods invoices was a very labor-intensive process. At one point, an employee was working on it almost full-time. Yet it’s an indirect cost that you really want to keep as low as possible.”
On top of that, invoices were hard to find. “The invoices were collected by the accounting department and distributed across various departments. As a result, we didn’t always know where an invoice was. If a customer or colleague had a question about an invoice, it involved a whole search process. We set out to find a solution to improve that process.”
When Van Gelder first got in touch with OneXillium, they hit it off right away. “The fact that OneXillium has proven experience with our ERP package, ‘Heart-Profit,’ was a major plus for us. That allowed them to fully understand our process. We’ve established a great partnership,” says Van Kouwen.
The implementation was an intensive process that, according to Van Kouwen, was completed quickly. “We first analyzed and set up the interface between Heart-Profit and the EIM platform. Then we made sure the suppliers submitted their invoices correctly—via email as PDF files, including the purchase order number. That’s actually standard practice these days. After that, we were ready to go. The initial setup process was two weeks of intensive work because everything was new, but after that, everything went smoothly for us.”
Van Gelder’s suppliers also benefit from the EIM platform. “We now have a much shorter turnaround time in our administrative process. Within one or two days, an invoice is processed and the payment is ready. And if a supplier calls with a question about an invoice, we can look it up with the push of a button,” says Van Kouwen.
