ERP Software Systems Index for Manufacturing
CDC Ross ERP
Nellson Nutraceutical
Case Study: Nellson Nutracenutical
Solution: Ross ERP
Industry: Food and Beverage
Country: U.S.A.
About The Company Los Angeles, Calif.–based Nellson Nutraceutical, LLC, is a leading provider of co-manufactured nutraceutical bar and powder products in North America. The company operates three flexible, strategically located manufacturing facilities and designs and manufactures highly nutritious, fortified products that are 100 percent built to order for each customer. Since its founding in 1962, Nellson has kept abreast of growth by emphasizing research and development to give its customers the most appealing nutritional products.
Challenges
A few years ago, Nellson’s main challenge was its lack of a single operational system of record. At the time, the company had two manufacturing facilities, each operating its own system. Although the combination of systems was meeting the company’s basic requirements—either directly or indirectly, via ancillary tools—neither platform was advanced or stable enough to be turned into the company’s sole system of record.
Having two systems was also inefficient. There was a significant amount of duplicate data entry, and Nellson had to resort to Excel and Access databases to reconcile its financials and make up for missing functionality. Additionally, Nellson could not present a single voice to customers. Customers who bought products from both facilities were getting packing slips, invoices and other forms that looked different and had different information; this gave the impression that they were dealing with two different vendors.
Nellson set out to find a system that would help standardize its operations, provide a proven platform that could scale with the company’s aggressive growth plans, and deliver robust lot traceability functionality to meet increasingly stringent FDA mandates and customer quality assurance requirements.
“Because we’re a food manufacturer, lot traceability was actually the top requirement in our list of 25 or 30 criteria,” said Marc Gottlieb, director of ERP systems at Nellson Nutraceutical. “We had a process in place, but we wanted to be much more efficient
and scalable.”
Solution
Nellson engaged PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) to help find a list of viable software solutions based on its specific requirements. PWC came back with a list of six vendors that met Nellson’s criteria, and a search committee within Nellson narrowed down the choices to two companies: CDC Software and a major ERP suite vendor with a process manufacturing offering.
According to Gottlieb, although there were positives and negatives for both solutions providers, the final decision came down to three key factors. The first was lot traceability, Nellson’s primary requirement. “CDC demonstrated Ross ERP’s full backward and forward lot traceability functionality without a hitch,” said Gottlieb. “But the other vendor could only demonstrate it in a PowerPoint presentation. When it came time to show their capabilities in a real demo, it became apparent that this was not their strong suit.”
Another factor in CDC’s favor was the fact that it took only one person to demonstrate every aspect of the software. The competing vendor had to bring in three different people to do the same thing. Said Gottlieb, “That was a red flag for us, because as a relatively small company back then—and one with strict cost controls—we were concerned that if it took the vendor three in-house experts to demonstrate the system, it would be very costly for us to manage it ourselves.”
Finally, Gottlieb and the selection team were concerned about this vendor’s plans for its process manufacturing product. The fact that this product was such a miniscule portion of its overall business left serious doubt as to its future prospects.
In June of that year, Nellson purchased Ross ERP. The company began implementation of the core ERP modules the following month in what was then its Los Angeles facility, and the system went live in that facility the following March. Since then, Nellson has implemented Ross ERP in its Salt Lake City plant—a facility five times the size of its Los Angeles plant—in 90 days.
Results
One Source of Clean Data
Implementation of Ross ERP has led to a number of key improvements within Nellson. These improvements stem from having cleaner transactional data integrated across the enterprise, as well as from Ross ERP’s built-in flexibility,
which has enabled Nellson to tailor the system to fit its business model.
For instance, Gottlieb and his team have been able to write a number of useful yield analysis and production analysis reports that are very specific to the way Nellson measures performance—reports that would have been nearly impossible to produce with the company’s previous disparate systems
Having one platform has also eliminated costly duplicate effort and speeded up a number of business processes. “We can now close our books about two days faster,” said Gottlieb. “We’ve also eliminated much of the duplicate data entry, manual processes, and our dependency on workarounds using Excel and Access databases.”
Strong Business Fit
Gottlieb also pointed to Ross ERP’s strong functional fit. “As different as we are, much of what we needed in an ERP system is standard functionality in Ross ERP,” he said. “For example, we can easily segregate and account for packaging inventory on consignment from a customer. And the system has very powerful unit-of-measure conversion capabilities, which allows us to bring everything down to base units of measure for reporting and analysis purposes. Having to do this manually would be extremely time consuming.”
Passed the Ultimate Test
Nellson typically gets audited by its major customers once a year. Part of this audit process involves a mock recall. According to Gottlieb, Ross ERP has enabled Nellson to streamline this process and cut down the time it takes to do a mock recall to just two hours. “The system tracks every transaction by part, lot and bin number, and because it makes it so easy to access the data, we can react much faster,”
Early in 2009, this reaction time was truly put to the test. But this time, the situation was real—and critical. Nellson was notified by the FDA that some of its products were potentially affected by the salmonella contamination originating from the Peanut Corporation of America’s (PCA) Blakely, Ga. plant. Within six hours of being notified, Nellson had identified all affected customers and emailed each a detailed report covering more than two years’ worth of finished product—including part number, lot number, shipment date and shipment information—that contained raw materials from the Blakely plant.
“No food company in the world wants to get that kind of news,” said Gottlieb. “But our ability to be proactive and react quickly to this incident made a very favorable impression on the impacted customers. And shortly after, when the PCA plant in Texas was also found to be noncompliant, we were again able to take fast action. We couldn’t be more pleased with the way Ross ERP performed when faced with this critical incident. It was further evidence that we had made the right software decision.”
Gottlieb added that putting Ross ERP to the test in a real and high-profile scenario helped Nellson identify where and how it can improve its recall reporting process. “This live stress test helped us see where we can make improvements,” he said. “Should there be a next time, the changes we’ve made will help make this process better and faster.”
A True Partnership
When asked about his overall experience with CDC Software and Ross ERP, Gottlieb immediately turned the conversation to Nellson’s relationship with the CDC team. “You know, they talk about how vendor relationships should be more like partnerships,” he said. “Well, this one truly is a partnership. We have very strong relationships with our CDC account reps, services directors and many of the CDC people.
“And in terms of the software, when I’m asked if I would purchase Ross ERP again today, I don’t hesitate to say, ‘Absolutely yes!’ The system was the best choice for us then and it is still the right fit today, even after our tremendous growth since we first deployed it.”
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