Europe‘s safest quality management system

About Schirnhofer GmbH
Today Schirnhofer is the quality leader in Europe’s pork meat sector, maintaining the safest and most sophisticated quality management system in the EU. Schirnhofer’s meat products are mainly sold via a shop-in-shop concept in more than 250 “Zielpunkt” and “Plus” supermarket stores. Additionally, the company exports to Germany and supplies several Eastern European countries with meat and meat products.

Schirnhofer is a family-owned business, employing more than 1700 people and supplied by several hundreds of contracted farmers. Schirnhofer guarantees high quality products, produced according to the most up-to-date hygiene criteria.

Requirements
After a serious meat scandal in 2001, Schirnhofer realised it needed a reliable quality management system to avoid any future problems. It decided to set up the safest and most comprehensive quality management system in Europe. It planned that sensitive activities in livestock fattening should be regulated and documented in detail, and that the whole chain of custody - from the farmer to the supermarket - would be captured in one single system. 

Services
In a first step all requirements and existing processes of the chain of custody were identified and evaluated. Animal feed and health care were identified as the most sensitive areas and were, therefore, given high priority. Schirnhofer then dared to take a revolutionary step; for the first time in the meat sector the Internet was used to collect data from farmers, veterinaries, feed producers, inspection bodies, etc.

Today, farmers log in on an Internet portal and document all their activities in Intact‘s software Nutriweb. In order to guarantee that people with little affinity to computers also got their bearings, user friendliness was of utmost importance. For animal feed and the application of pharmaceuticals strict regulations and workflows are implemented, monitored by internal and external experts, e.g. veterinaries and the feed platform InfoXGen. After slaughter the carcass assessments are entered into Nutriweb and the data used to give the farmers valuable feedback on their animals.

The advantages of the Internet based documentation with Nutriweb are the decentralised data acquisition and data availability in real time. Under these conditions it is possible to react quickly in case of quality issues.
Intact‘s expertise triangle - industry expertise, software expertise and inspection expertise - were crucial to the incredible success of Schirnhofer, who is now market leader in quality management. The benefits experienced by Schirnhofer and the farmers exceeded all expectations. Animal health improved substantially and the use of pharmaceuticals has been reduced to a minimum.

Karl Schirnhofer, Managing Director, Schirnhofer GmbH
„With Intact we built up the best quality management system for pork all over Europe. Today we can offer Austria‘s safest meat.“