Productivity of some lines at the enterprises of the Group of Companies Molvest has decreased by half because of labeling

The expert noted that the company is currently operating normally, as it began preparing for labeling in the autumn of 2019, and by the spring of 2021, all cheese production sites were technically ready.

According to him, the labeling brought the need for additional control both at the production stage and during acceptance to the warehouse. Anatoly Losev added that the company had to increase the staff on some lines by 15%, because of which the productivity per employee of the company decreased.

The expert said that the suppliers of cheese packaging to the company were not ready to apply DataMatrix at their production facilities, so representatives of Molvest Group had to organize the application of codes directly on production lines, which added risks.

Anatoly Losev noted that malfunctions in the equipment for applying codes stop the entire production process, while the company manages to deliver products to consumers without failures.

‘There are a lot of subtleties in the cheese production, now labeling from the CATD have been added to them. There are problems with the staff: the work has been debugged, and a new critical process breaks the usual, well-established practices. This is probably one of the main problems. People, focusing on DataMatrix, slow down the usual processes and may make mistakes in the worked-out places. Of course, in the high season, this brings a lot of problems. On the move, we change the algorithms of work; the whole team try to cope with the problems. We expect more serious difficulties at the next stages,’ Anatoly Losev stressed.

He also noted that because of reduced productivity on some lines, the company would suffer losses.

‘In addition, we still have a part of the packaging that will not be used due to the requirements of some retail chains. The costs of equipment and software for implementation of "Honest mark" labeling also turned out to be significant, as well as the cost of labels. This can also be attributed to losses. At the testing stages, some of the products were damaged,’ the expert said.

He added that during the first days of the introduction of mandatory labeling of cheeses, there were difficulties in the work of the State Information system of labeling goods "Honest mark", because it took much time to get a respond from the integrator; slow passage of orders, which, according to Anatoly Losev, sometimes did not get into the system, as well as the reports.

‘Now, all functions are being worked out slower than it was before the start of mandatory labeling, but in general it is not critical. As we said earlier, the labeling from the CATD is complex and carries heavy loads on the business. In general, the cost of labeling per year in our company will amount to about 300 million rubles. This is about a quarter of the annual investment budget,’ Anatoly Losev concluded.

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