Customer Story: Ainsworth Pet Nutrition Expands With ERP

Highlights

When market demand for pet food doubled, Ainsworth Pet Nutrition decided it was time to purchase an ERP system to help manage growth. Now, America’s oldest privately owned pet food company is continuing to expand and relies on its JustFood system to ensure the safety and quality of its product.

Since implementing JustFood, Ainsworth Pet Nutrition has:


Advance Ship Notice (ASN) can be complicated but necessary if you are doing a lot of case picking. The other day I looked at a large retailer’s order. Where we used to sell them three or four items, we are now able to include 30 items on the order.

Jamie Hornstein, Director Information Services

Ainsworth Pet Nutrition

Ainsworth Pet Nutrition is America’s oldest privately owned pet food company and was founded in 1933 in Meadville, Pennsylvania. It employs more than 500 employees at its head office, manufacturing facility and warehouses in Meadville, its sales and marketing office in Sewickley, PA, and at an additional manufacturing facility, more warehouses and an office in Dumas, Arkansas. All manufacturing is done in the U.S. and the bulk all of Ainsworth’s ingredients are sourced from local suppliers.

The Challenge

When market demand for pet food doubled between 2000 and 2007, Ainsworth decided it was time to purchase an ERP system to help them manage growth. Ainsworth selected JustFood largely because of the food industry specific functionality the software system was known for, and in 2007, Ainsworth officially went live with 30 licensed users.

The Solution

Since 2007, Ainsworth has added more than 20 users to their JustFood system and has over 100 employees trained on the software.

In 2011, Ainsworth implemented JF Floor – a mobile web interface that lets employees access the JustFood system via handheld guns to scan barcodes for production output and movements throughout their warehouses. “Our warehouse tracking systems were antiquated,” says Jamie Hornstein, Director of Information Services at Ainsworth. “We were happy to see the lower cost user licenses for JF Floor,” which are substantially lower than the cost of regular Microsoft Dynamics licenses.

Ainsworth also implemented JustFood’s Advance Ship Notification (ASN) module to comply with the 10% of their retail customers who mandated them to use ASN for shipping and labelling. “It can be complicated and necessary if you are doing a lot of case picking,” says Hornstein. “The other day I looked at a large retailer’s order. Where we used to sell them three or four items, we are now able to include 30 items on the order.” Ainsworth had a hand in customizing their JustFood ASN module to fit their warehouse’s unique layout and design.

The Benefits

By utilizing JustFood’s ASN and EDI functionality, Ainsworth has been able to land a number of new mass merchandiser accounts. The complete visibility into warehousing data has resulted in “improved inventory accuracy, better visibility into inventory status and the increased management of quality holds in the system,” says Hornstein.

In addition, JustFood’s Warehouse Management System has proven invaluable to the pet food manufacturer as it continues to grow and open additional warehouses and plants across the U.S. Now, Ainsworth uses JustFood’s Material Requirements Planning (MRP) and Master Production Scheduling (MPS) modules to better forecast and plan production across all of its warehouses.

Ainsworth has also recently become the first pet manufacturing company in the U.S. to receive a Facilities Food Safety audit rating of “Excellent” from the Safe Quality Foods (SQF) Level II International auditing standard in accordance with the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI).

The Future

Ainsworth plans to further automate lot traceability and recall functionalities within their JustFood system to help eliminate the manual processes they’ve relied on in the past. Historically, employees would have to manually check production records to confirm raw materials and finished product specifications. Once these functionalities are implemented, employees will be able to hit a single “Trace” button within JustFood and be done.