A leading purveyor of quality snack foods, Old Dutch Foods was founded in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1934. For more than seven decades, the company has been meeting the needs of its U.S. customers with a commitment to high quality, great taste, innovation, and leadership.

Old Dutch Foods also has a strong presence in Canada, from its first manufacturing facility in Manitoba opened in 1954 to 11 distribution centers across Canada today. As part of a strategic initiative to increase penetration of the Atlantic Canadian market, the company acquired competitor Humpty Dumpty in 2000, which added an existing manufacturing and distribution facility in Hartland, New Brunswick to the Old Dutch Foods network.

Though Old Dutch Foods’ strategies have been quite successful in growing the Atlantic Canadian market, it recognized the need to increase efficiency and accuracy if it was to maintain its leadership position, while at the same time upholding its commitment to the existing labor force that had been an important part of the company’s success over the years.

Four key objectives identified by project team:

• Meet efficiency goals by doubling distribution center production with the existing labor force, thereby creating a more streamlined organization.
• Ensure product quality by implementing both lot and serialized control of all SKUs and shipments.
• Eliminate inventory shrinkage through the use of serialized inventory tracking.
• Increase distribution center throughput, processing orders and scheduling trailers at shorter intervals and with faster turnaround times.

During the initial design process, Jorn Remmem, Director of Plant Operations and Engineering for Old Dutch Foods, carefully searched for a strategic partner that could provide not only the distribution center mechanization required, but had a track record of success with business process engineering, as well as experience integrating the JD Edwards ERP platform with a Warehouse Control System (WCS) and Warehouse Management System (WMS).

“Probably the most important consideration,” said Jorn, “was that we had a partner we could trust, work closely with, and would be responsive to our needs as we engineered, installed, and integrated the new facility. We found that partner with MSI Automate.”

To achieve its objectives, the MSI Automate team developed a distribution center design that seamlessly receives product from manufacturing and delivers orders directly into waiting trailers.

Once the final production operations are complete, cases of manufactured product are moved to the warehouse and staged in a forward pick area. Pallets are staged according to lot, and are serialized for future tracking to ensure first in, first out (FIFO) picking and traceability through the entire manufacturing and distribution process, including delivery to the retail location and, ultimately, the end customer.

The process is initiated when the JD Edwards host computer organizes orders by truckload in reverse stop sequence, and lanes are assigned by the MSI Automate Warehouse Control System. Orders are then batch-picked by generic SKUs and released to RF picking. Cases are promptly loaded onto the shipping conveyor where they are scanned and assigned to specific orders by the WCS, which also assigns the product serial numbers to the order at that time — enabling every case to be tracked to destination. The system enables multiple orders to be processed simultaneously.

Once cartons have been sorted (via the Sliding Shoe Sorter)by trailer and route, they are confirmed to JD Edwards, and physical shipping documents as well as electronic records are transmitted.