Trident Seafoods

Challenge

With a large part of the company’s operations in Alaska, Trident Seafoods faces many unique business challenges – location, weather, and connectivity issues, to name a few.

“We needed to have 24/7 service from many different locations in order to record transactions into our ERP system. And most systems on the market at that time simply couldn’t provide us with that level of serviceability,” Trident business analyst Mike Wheeler recalls.

Trident aimed to implement mobile barcode scanning and data collection to enhance the efficiency of inventory and manufacturing transactions. They required a system that could operate around the clock with offline capabilities, capturing transactional information through scanners in a mobile environment.

We needed to have 24/7 service from many different locations in order to record transactions into our ERP system. Most systems...couldn’t provide that.

Mike Wheeler, Business Analyst

Trident Seafoods

Solution

Trident Seafoods deployed the RFgen Mobile Foundations for JD Edwards solution to scan and capture critical information and create transactions, such as inventory transfers, work orders, order picks, and pallet labels. Their new RFgen mobile system is flexible, scalable, and adaptable to almost any mobile transaction, plus it is tightly integrated to Trident Seafoods’ ERP system, Oracle’s JD Edwards.

The first order of business for Trident was to collect the initial transactions at the remote plants, where fish are prepared for transport on ships. The team at RFgen designed a process to output this information from various production solutions to .csv spreadsheet files and then import those files into RFgen to make the transactions available to JD Edwards.

“RFgen gives us 24-hour system availability. We can take a file from any of our Alaska plants at any point in time, 24/7. That was a key system criterion for us,” Wheeler said.

RFgen gives us 24-hour system availability. We can take a file from any of our Alaska plants at any point in time, 24/7. That was a key system criterion for us.

Mike Wheeler, Business Analyst

Trident Seafoods

Results

RFgen adds speed and efficiency to Trident Seafoods’ operations, which processes approximately 1.2 million transactions each year. Benefits include:

Tripled transaction volume.
Expanded business without a ton of added expenses.
Ability to manage offline transactions.
Ability to easily transfer and receive material between plants in Alaska, Minnesota, Oregon and Washington.
Ease of use and simplified scanning screens for more than 150 team members that require scanners, including many seasonal employees.

From the time we installed RFgen nine years ago until today, we’ve tripled the volume of transactions, but the support required has not really changed.

Rick Resto, CIO

Trident Seafoods

The right solution for unique challenges

Trident Seafoods continues to evaluate the ways they can leverage the power of RFgen’s offerings as they grow and their needs evolve. RFgen is the right solution for the unique challenges of the seafood business.

“From a strategic standpoint, high availability is critical, as well as the .csv processing for remote plants,” said Rick Resto, Trident’s CIO. “And license plating helps the company better serve important customers.”

Trident Seafoods is a vertically integrated harvester, processor and marketer of seafood, meaning the company controls quality and production processes “From the Source to the Plate®.” That’s no easy feat when your supply chain starts out swimming around in remote regions of the Bering Sea and ends on dinner tables around the world. Not surprisingly, a lot of technology is needed to support the manufacturing and distribution steps in between.

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