Atlanta Bonded Warehouse (ABW), a family owned third party warehouse provider, has delivered public and contract food-grade, temperature-controlled distribution services for over 60 years. Warehouse management system (WMS) from Blue Yonder has helped them increase efficiency within the warehouse, given them the ability to perform individual employee measurements and provide their customers with confidence in their services.
Success Story
Atlanta Bonded Warehouse
Warehouse Management, Warehouse Labor Management
Atlanta Bonded Warehouse standardizes warehouse operations
The company
The business challenge
Atlanta Bonded Warehouse Corporation (ABW) has provided public and contract food-grade, temperature-controlled distribution services for over 60 years and has grown to 3.8 million square feet of modern, high cube storage and distribution capacity in 12 facilities across the southeast. ABW sought to standardize their warehouse operations and the services they provide in order to be an all-in-one provider to their supply chain customers. ABW’s paper based legacy system made this very challenging. ABW’s goals were to implement a highly configurable warehouse management system that would offer more functionality than their legacy system and to move their customers’ products through their supply chains in a much more efficient manner, while retaining the ability to track and trace food lot codes to support food safety requirements.
The solution
By utilizing warehouse management and labor management together, ABW was able to increase warehouse efficiencies. The extensive configuration capabilities of the Blue Yonder digital platform enabled ABW to standardize warehouse operations, thus improving visibility and accuracy. With extra functionalities within warehouse management, such as track and trace, ABW saw significant improvement in customers’ level of confidence.
“During the first five years of using Blue Yonder’s warehouse management, we realized a variety of benefits. Certainly, the first was improved warehouse efficiency, using directed work to direct the lift-truck operators. Interleaving inbound and outbound tasks to reduce trips with empty forks instantly improved efficiency. Now, we’re starting to capture data to measure individual performance. Those are some of the big benefits we are seeing.”
–General Manager of Public Warehouse Operations, Atlanta Bonded Warehouse
Competitive advantage
“Blue Yonder’s warehouse management gives us a distinct competitive advantage over other third-party logistics providers (3PLs) in our region. The additional functionality within Blue Yonder’s platform gives our customers confidence that ABW can provide the services they need,” per General Manager of Public Warehouse Operations, Atlanta Bonded Warehouse.
Speed of delivery
“Speed of delivery is very important to Atlanta Bonded Warehouse. Our environment is very dynamic. We onboard a new customer about once every three weeks. Our growth rate has been extremely rapid so the ability to have support from Blue Yonder to address needs as we onboard new customers.”
Standardizing services
“Our Blue Yonder digital platform, with its extensive configuration capabilities, allows us to be that individual, unique provider to any one particular customer, while at the same time using industry standard support to cover the basics that every customer needs in their supply chain.”
“Our Blue Yonder digital platform, with its extensive configuration capabilities, allows us to be that individual, unique provider to any one particular customer, while at the same time using industry standard support to cover the basics that every customer needs in their supply chain.”
“Many of the other platforms we researched would tell us, for example, ‘If you have item 123 for two different customers, you must augment the item code to make it unique. Blue Yonder’s digital platform didn’t require that, so both customer A and customer B could have item 123 and we could maintain them uniquely in the software. That’s just one critical attribute that we considered, but across multiple solutions and other key features, Blue Yonder’s platform clearly rose to the top.”
–General Manager of Public Warehouse Operations, Atlanta Bonded Warehouse
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