TAFEL LEIPZIG delivers greater impact to those in need with Oracle
TAFEL LEIPZIG boosts service quality for those in need, expands its services, and complies with general data protection regulation.
TAFEL LEIPZIG distributes food and other consumer goods to those in need in the city of Leipzig, Germany, and its surroundings. The organization is supported by the local food industry as well as by businesses, the media, and private individuals by means of donations and/or volunteering. Apart from distributing food, TAFEL LEIPZIG also organizes and supports other social activities and projects such as cookery courses for children, a children’s experience restaurant, other events for children like vacation trips or celebrations on occasions like first days of school or Christmas, and the Tafel gardens, where to date, several hundreds of tons of fruit and vegetables for distribution have been produced by the participants of professional integration programs.
Attributed to continuous growth in recent years, the volume of documents and data to be processed has also risen significantly. Manual, decentralized data management could no longer cope with this challenge and also failed to meet the new requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which are critical—especially with regard to processing sensitive customer information. TAFEL LEIPZIG therefore needed a modern system to administer customer, supplier, sponsor, and employee data.
“Oracle Cloud Platform enables us to work in a more efficient, flexible, and future-proof way, while meeting all data protection requirements. We now distribute donated food—which would otherwise go to waste—to even more people in need and believe that our move to Oracle Cloud sets a precedent for other food charities in Germany.”
Business challenges
- Migrate customer and supplier data, which are manually administered in Excel tables, to a future-proof system that meets all GDPR requirements and enables greater efficiency with regard to the collection and distribution of donated food
- Deploy a system that is intuitively operable and eliminates as many errors as possible, since the organization’s largely volunteer workforce has limited IT knowledge and experience
- Simplify access to documents to ensure the smooth provisioning of those in need throughout the city at all times
- Create a technological basis for the long-term plan to digitally log, visualize, and assess the overall throughput of goods, so that further efficiency gains can be achieved and further potential can be harnessed with regard to the collection and distribution of food
- Minimize the new system’s deployment and operational costs to ensure optimum use of budget, which is funded solely by donations
With Oracle Cloud, we improved our performance and met all the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation. This means that we can even better fulfill our ethical mission of providing Leipzig’s people of need with high-quality foods that would otherwise be disposed of. Oracle technology is thus making an important contribution to the common good and to a livable society.
Results
- Transferred all data to Oracle Content and Experience so that the data is fully protected and protective mechanisms are documented, fulfilling one of TAFEL LEIPZIG’s key requirements to comply with all GDPR provisions
- Achieved enormous efficiency gains thanks to the far more flexible and powerful data processing capabilities of Oracle Cloud, simplifying day-to-day verification of customers’ entitlements and improving customer service
- Gained the ability to compile reports instantly, accurately, and without manual efforts—considerably reducing working time and minimizing input errors
- Obtained real-time access to customer authorizations and purchases at distribution points throughout the city, as data is now stored centrally in Oracle Cloud and can be accessed through mobile devices—ensuring smooth dispensing of food and goods
- Leveraged the flexibility and scalability of Oracle Database Exadata Express Cloud Service to provide a basis for continued growth, and for the medium-term plan for an Internet of Things (IoT) solution that will collate location data from delivery vehicles as well as weight data for incoming and outgoing goods, monitor temperatures at cold stores, and will allow introduction and use of customer authorization cards
- Empowered inexperienced users to work productively with Oracle Content and Experience’s intuitive user interface after an only a two-hour introduction tutorial to the existing staff, while new employees can easily be trained by current users
- Implemented and operated Oracle Content and Experience and Oracle Database Exadata Express Cloud Service with minimal costs, leveraging Oracle´s tailor-made performance and cost structure to optimally use the organization’s donation-based budget