Agricultural Cooperative of Zagora, Pelio

Case Study

Company: Agricultural Cooperative of Zagora, Pelio

Category: Manufacture, Cooperatives

Applications: Galaxy Enterprise Suite, Galaxy Retail

Company

The Agricultural Cooperative of Zagora, Pelio was established in 1916 by 199 residents of Zagora. In 1985, the Cooperative entered a new phase of an organized commercial company. Its trademark was registered and each genuine Zagorin apple bears this sticker, making it unique. In 1996 the company was acknowledged with the “Protected Designation of Origin” Label by the European Union and Zagorin apples traveled all around the world, conquering international markets, with over 100 years of constant production and presence in the agricultural sector.

Need

For the Cooperative, a strategic choice is our focus on quality and the protection of the producers’/members’ interests, as well as respect for the customer and consumer needs. Our primary goals was to achieve integrated monitoring of the production procedure, quality control, traceability and deployment of procedures to facilitate farmers and producers.

Solution

The Cooperative choose the Galaxy IT system by Epsilon SingularLogic. Trust in the solutions and reliability provided by Epsilon SingularLogic, the extensive functionality of Galaxy and its expandability are some of the reasons behind this choice. Galaxy ERP and Galaxy Retail covered all the sectors of the Cooperative’s business activity, such as production, processing, supply chain, financial management, B2B & retail sales.

The basic axes where the organization needed to focus to achieve its goals were the following:
• Mapping of producers’ cultivable land
• Monitoring of agricultural products’ processing, from collection, sorting and packaging to sales
• Integration of production and quality control processes in producer batches
• Monitoring of production batches traceability
• Reflection of the produced item actual cost in all production stages
• Creation of a flexible system for monitoring producers (statements, settlements)
• Supply of general insurance services to producers-members
• Reduction of transfer expenses
• Monitoring of the packaging materials supply chain
The Cooperative has developed additional activities promoting its products and covering producers’ needs, including two Super Markets, a plant protection products store, two farmers’ market outlets and one agricultural supplies outlet. Its goals with regard to the additional activities were the following:
• Automation of each activity’s processes
• Financial monitoring per activity
• Electronic logging of • Plant protection products and prescriptions
• Automation of communications with organizations of the Ministry of Agriculture
• Direct and secure communication with retail systems of outlets and super markets

Benefits

The deployment of Galaxy and the integration of best business practices allowed the Cooperative of Zagora to secure significant benefits:
• Modernization of its IT systems, utilizing the cutting edge technology features used by Galaxy
• Unification of scarred IT systems in a single platform
• Creation and automation of company processes, maintaining a flexible operational structure
• Complete traceability of producer batches
• Exact specification of actual cost in each production process stage
• Central system for monitoring qualitative and quantitative features and financial transactions with producers
• Modeling of the loading monitoring system, with decision making for own means or third party means
• Eradication of management errors
• Batch traceability monitoring for major chains and strategic customers
• Minimization of producers liabilities management time, in combination with the use of secure web banking directly in the application, securing accurate and fast payments
• Central control system for all the Cooperative points of sales
• Detailed Reporting and a complete MIS information system for all Cooperative operations, significantly contributing to reducing management cost
• Reduction of product batch tracing time from a few hours to a few minutes
• 9% reduction of packaging materials cost
• 23% reduction of trans-loading cost via immediate change of means
• 22% quicker order settlement
• 13% service cost reduction
• 100% improvement in collecting activity results
• 30% reduction in daily registrations checks time
• 20% improvement in collecting liabilities from debtors

Testimonials

We constantly invest on the modernization of our Cooperative, in order to improve the quality of our products, support our producers and boost our sales and exports. In the current era, modernization goes hand in hand with digital transformation, and this is why we trusted Epsilon SingularLogic and Galaxy and our choice was justified. In a very short amount of time, we have already seen important improvements in quicker settlement of our processes, and this has contributed in reducing our operating cost, allowing us to provide faster and better service in the entire spectrum of our supply chain.

Antonios D. Laskos

President of the Agricultural Cooperative of Zagora, Pelio