Freiberger is Europe’s leading supplier of food products made from “dough with stuff on it.” The company develops and produces frozen pizza, pasta and baguettes with a customer base consisting of leading international retailers and catering chains.

The company guides its operations by a policy of quality, capability, innovation and consistency. For over 25 years, this is how the company has dominated the market with maximum efficiency and total customer focus. Today, Freiberger is Europe’s largest producer of frozen pizzas.

Like many manufacturing organizations, a key challenge in running its business is managing the procedures involved in new product development – a critical process for Freiberger that begins with the idea of a new product through to final production and sale of the product. This process for Freiberger was very complex due to the many stages and departments involved in the process and the fact that the company could potentially have 100 parallel product ideas flowing through the process simultaneously.

Freiberger had been controlling the steps involved in this process through the use of Excel spreadsheets and realized that in order to successfully launch new products into the market, it was imperative that they move to an automated environment and one that would enable the company to closely monitor its product development procedures across all stages and departments involved.

Working with Metastorm partner and system integrator SHD System Haus Dresden GmbH, the company set out to find a solution to automate its product development process. The company required a solution that met all of its key requirements including the ability to provide:

• Improved documentation of all stages in the product development process
• Secure transmission of all relevant information to the role/structure units involved in each stage
• Transparent status information on all development and sales information
• Improved communication between project management and sales

With the help of SHD System Haus Dresden, Freiberger selected Metastorm BPM™, a Business Process Management software solution to develop an automated and streamlined new product development process.

Metastorm BPM met the company’s key requirements and was immediately implemented to launch “Project Request.” The project – which used Metastorm BPM to secure transparency and internal communication across Freiberger for its extensive parallel product development procedures – was very successful.

"The solution is Metastorm BPM," says Mr. Hausmann, Head of IT from Freiberger. "The integration of Metastorm into our standard Novell email system went fast and well because all our employees have cooperated and accepted the new system. We now exclusively continue working with Metastorm BPM over the email system," says Mr. Hausmann.

Using Metastorm BPM, requests are now entered directly into the system and emails are generated automatically to notify and distribute essential information to all involved departments. Key information is readily available for Freiberger’s management team to make better decisions on things like whether the development suggestion for a specific request is in line with the company strategy. The company now has the ability to view the current status and the history of all ongoing projects – an important feature for the company to be able to have visibility into similar or like projects. The control features that Metastorm BPM provides helps the company compute whether the suggestion is economical and most importantly, allows development to begin immediately after request release and approval.