Italicatessen

Founded in 2002 as a small family-run business, Italicatessen is the leading importer and distributor of authentic Italian food and wine into Irish retail and food services markets. The Italicatessen warehouse, based in Newtownmountkennedy in County Wicklow, has ambient, chilled and frozen storage as well as a state-of-the-art food production room, from where their own fleet of vehicles offers a fast delivery service to Dublin and across the country.

When we first engaged with the team at Italicatessen, they were running a busy warehouse with an inefficient and inaccurate paper-based system. Strong growth prompted them to plan a move to a new purpose-built distribution centre and they invited us to work with them to create a paperless environment that would drive efficiencies and enable them to better support their service to customers.

As we always do, we first took the time to get to know our customer’s business, to understand the nature of their service commitment to their customers, their plans for growth, and the pinch points in their operation.

Italicatessen promises the delivery of premium fresh products to their customer’s door without any loss of quality.

We heard how, after safety, time management is the most important element of operations. Italicatessen also relies on a multicultural team, naturally including many Italian operatives, so it was vital that we help them to clearly communicate all essential requests and actions within their process. This would in turn enable the technology to support the high-level discerning human intervention required to deliver safely and on time to the right person in the right place every time.

From our research and analysis with Italicatessen, it became evident that we could help them to make significant improvements to the pick and pack operation within their warehouse, and so we set about designing their new system.

In order to have every part of the operation communicating precisely and succinctly throughout, and working closely with our client’s team, we designed a customised Timewise Systems platform, including the latest generation of voice technology running on the Android platform, for integration with the Italicatessen ERP system.

We then trialled and tested extensively to ensure that when implemented, their new system would deliver the accuracy and efficiencies that they required to underpin their ambitious plans for growth.