SAVOYE equips Clémence & Antonin's logistic warehouse

Founded in 2013, Clémence & Antonin produces and distributes home-delivered meals for elderly people in France. Over the past 10 years, the company has significantly expanded its operations and opted to engage SAVOYE to overhaul its order preparation processes in order to sustain this growth.

Growing rapidly since its inception, the company opened its warehouse in September 2019 and launched its own production unit in 2022. This unit produces 145,000 meals per quarter. “These advancements have empowered us to achieve autonomy from production to meal delivery to consumers. Concurrently, we’ve been expanding the Clémence & Antonin brand through franchising. Four new branches will be opening soon,” says Stéphane OMER, President of Clémence & Antonin.

In its warehouse, the order pickers are responsible for preparing 2,300 meals a day, with one major challenge: creating menus composed of four starters, four main courses, four cheeses, and four desserts: “Our customers would fill in their menus, and we would then prepare our orders according to the forty or so rounds scheduled for the day. Everything was done manually. The operator had all the menus for a customer’s week on a sheet of paper, along with labels to identify the bags of orders. Not only did this require a long training period for the staff, but above all, we reached high error rates, of the order of 40 to 50 per month“, explains Stéphane OMER.

A high-performance logistics installation, soon to be doubled

Aware of the impact of these errors on customer satisfaction and the development of his franchise business, the president of Clémence & Antonin began looking for a solution that would enable him to secure his customers’ order preparations, and avoid errors and unnecessary handling by his staff. It was in the press that he came across a project similar to his own being carried out with SAVOYE: “I contacted them and we launched the project in March 2023”, continues Stéphane OMER. In April of the same year, six SAVOYE connected furniture units were installed. These are supplied from the front with the necessary items for meal preparation. Orders are prepared at the front on a conveyor belt. The slots light up sequentially to guide the operator through picking, displaying the quantity to be picked. Automatic error detection and management is provided by a LIDAR placed above the picking unit. Each unit is equipped with a delivery note printer and a barcode reader connected to the Pick-to-Light hub. Locations can be changed simply by reconfiguring the associated LED groups and the coordinates of the detected locations. The LED strips include a quantity display, correction buttons, and a magnetic ring validation system to interface with the operator during supply or picking operations. “The benefits are numerous. Among the most obvious, I’d mention the vertiginous fall in our error rate and the speed of execution: previously, it took between 45 and 48 seconds to prepare a meal. Today, it only takes 28 seconds. Last but not least, operator training has been cut from 15 days to around five minutes“, emphasizes Stéphane OMER.

Six order-pickers now handle 11,000 meals a week. In total, Clémence & Antonin prepares 580,000 meals a year using the system set up by SAVOYE: “We’re going to extend our building and order-picking facility, with the aim of adding 12 units. We found a responsive, serious team at Savoye with a thorough understanding of the business“, concludes Stéphane OMER.

 

Photo credit: Clémence et Antonin company