Americans love nuts, and American Nuts, LLC, one of the largest nut processors in North America, loves high-quality products as much as positive business results. A newly-released RFID enabled ERC (Enterprise Resource Control) System from Senitron and Avery Dennison contributes substantially to both.

Founded in 1988, American Nuts began in a small facility of just 10,000 square feet. As customers became aware of their quality products, commitment to excellence, and dedication to offering a variety of services, the company grew quickly – from peanut to coconut size, figuratively speaking. Today, American Nuts runs operations in five facilities in California and Ohio and has become one of the largest nut processors in North America.

To combine the ongoing commitment to excellence with a healthy dose of profitability, American Nuts wanted to better control their business in the areas of Inventory/ Warehousing, Operations/ Production and Quality Management. Similar to many manufacturing companies, American Nuts was using a well-known ERP system, but similar to other traditional systems, inventory data accuracy was not practical to achieve, so they started to consider leveraging other technologies to address their most pressing concerns. Besides inventory accuracy, American Nuts was looking to computerize all aspects of operations including shop floor controls, warehouse management, production scheduling, quality control management, centralized communication system, real-time alerts and data analytics.

After much research they learned that none of the available solutions had a complete all-in-one package to accommodate all of their needs, and especially nothing with automated real-time capabilities, until they came across Senitron’s ERC RFID system specifically designed to tackle complex manufacturing challenges and workflow requirements.

Immediately after the meeting and demonstration of Senitron’s ERC RFID system, American Nuts realized that this was the perfect solution they were looking for. The CEO, CFO, and top operations management were simply amazed to see how this system was built to address the pain-points they had been facing, and unanimously approved the deployment of the ERC solution.

Though RFID tracking is nothing new and has been around for many years, Senitron’s ERC solution stands out by combining RFID with proprietary software resulting in an entire manufacturing facility using ERC’s unified platform to transact every action. From the personnel on the warehouse floor receiving purchase orders in ERC and applying Avery Dennison

AD-665u8 products (performing exceptionally well in a wide array of applications and across a broad range of dielectrics) to the production managers scheduling productions in the ERC scheduler, the sales team checking RFID real-time inventory, order fulfillment crew using ERC to locate, pick and ship inventory, all the way to upper management being able to observe, analyze and make informative business decisions using ERC’s management dashboard.

“ERC is not a substitute but rather an add-on supplement to any existing ERP/MRP system. Capable of integrating with any ERP/MRP system, our solution gives organizations control and visibility of its health, data, operations, and profitability," says Joe Saghezi, Senitron CTO

Impressive results and future outlook
With the system up and running, American Nuts has already started to benefit from the availability of accurate real-time inventory information and built in controls. Here is what American Nuts has to say about Senitron’s ERC system.

"ERC’s easy to use interface along with instructional videos in each module and around-the-clock support made this implementation unexpectedly seamless. My favorite feature is how the scheduling system generates electronic work orders allowing me to monitor production in real time and take immediate action if necessary," states Santiago Diaz, American Nuts production manager.

Nate Willits, American Nuts CFO, comments, “Thanks to ERC we expect to reduce inventory levels within the next six to twelve months by at least 25%, significantly reducing future inventory obsolescence and carrying costs. With accurate lot-cost information now at hand, we anticipate an improvement in contribution margins by at least 3-5%.”

“The decision to partner with Senitron proved to be beneficial in helping us to strive for continuous improvement in all aspects of our organization. ERC system provides management with crucial real-time data and analytics to make informative and strategic decisions laying the foundation for maximizing profitability and growth," adds Duncan Lavery, American Nuts CEO.