>5,000
Even in the fourth generation, the company Dr. Oetker is characterized by the family of its owners. The corporate strategy stands for sustainable growth and is future-oriented; the products and branches of the company are spreading their wings at breathtaking speed. This progress in the field of product development is associated with continuously increasing demands of the consumers.
Oetker began more than a hundred years ago in the antechamber of a pharmacy in Bielefeld. The revolutionary product of young Dr. August Oetker was the baking powder Backing – he promised that this powder would immediately make each cake a success. Even at that time, the young pharmacist knew that only his name could stand as a guarantee on the product and would be the hallmark for best quality – one of Germany’s first branded products was born. As a leader of his times, Oetker very soon tried to step into overseas markets. Oetker was known for pioneering work; hence, it was no surprise that in 1970 Oetker brought Germany’s first deepfrozen pizza into the market. Values such as continuity, reliability and solidity are the fundamental guiding principles for the company Oetker. The corporate philosophy Quality is the best recipe just bears testimony to this.
One of the basic prerequisites for the success of the Dr. Oetker brand is that conformance to quality and safety standards in the products can be taken for granted. The aim is to identify risks in development, production, transport and preparation of the products and minimize hazards. The software application was not geared to meet the growing requirements in the nineties in the field of product development. The cooperation with SpecPage was initiated shortly before the turn of the millenium. PDM was a standard program of the Swiss software vendor but with the help of Dr. Oetker, the system was expanded to perfectly meet the requirements of the company. We could bring in our requirements and requests in the best possible manner, highlights Thomas Schäfer, Project Manager, Research and Development Division at Oetker. We wanted to have an easy-to-use tool in the company that would simplify many things; for cost reasons, we did not want it to be a specific development but a standard program.
Dr. Oetker was looking for a product that was modern and could still fulfill the special requirements well. This worked out best with our cooperation with SpecPage, says Schäfer. It was no longer necessary to rewrite each new recipe and record each change; with PDM you can easily do a fresh assignment and the work step is over. This is much simpler and much more efficient and we thus can save a lot of work. Thomas Schäfer affirms with pride and a serving of praise: «We have so far not faced a system crash; the system is functioning in a very stable manner. For us, it is a very comfortable feeling that we can rely so much on the security of our system.
Internationalization is an important chapter in the corporate history of Dr. Oetker. Production and sales companies are functioning not only in all European countries but also in Canada and Brazil. A total of 3,500 products are manufactured and sold across the globe. Centralized data maintenance is absolutely essential to ensure a common base of all Dr. Oetker locations. Multilocation and client options of PDM offer a mature tool to meet this need. Quality assurance and production of the highest levels is crucial to all Dr. Oetker locations. With PDM, we have the data in one database and thus it is easy for each and every employee to call up this data at any time,» explains Thomas Schäfer. Especially in the field of allergens whose importance in the field of food laws is increasing, it is important to have access to certain data in a tabular format. This is an application that you need to be able to respond to corresponding queries. Using PDM, we can quickly and competently respond to queries from consumers, associations and other authorities in a speedy and convincing manner.
The goal of quality assurance of this Bielefeld-based company is to continuously improve the Dr. Oetker quality and exclude all possible risk factors. With PDM it should be possible in the future to even store the safety margins of raw materials. «Here we have some special ideas that can be well taken care of in PDM. For this, it is important to have programmers so close at hand as it is the case with the co-operation between Dr. Oetker and SpecPage
Dr. Udo Spiegel,
Head of R&D, Quality Management, Dr. Oetker 
