Case Studies

Customer Case Studies

Concordia Publishing House

Project: Replace an obsolete, manual order picking system in an antiquated facility without interrupting the present operation for one of the largest publishers of denominational materials in the United States.

Concordia Publishing House in St. Louis, Missouri needed to develop completely new systems to replace their slow, inaccurate and labor intensive, 20-year-old order selection system. The new system needed to be designed to integrate order selection with printing, warehousing, packing and shipping operations. Housed in less than ideal facilities including, low 14’ ceilings with 30” diameter columns on 20’ centers, the new system had to be designed and installed around the old system without hindering ongoing operations. The irregular shape of the multi-story facility complicated matters, as there had been several additions to the building over the years.

Spartan Stores

Project: New general merchandise, slow-mover grocery facility in Toledo, Ohio for Seaway Food Town, a division of Spartan Stores, Inc., an industry leading supermarket chain.

Food Town needed to consolidate 180,000 square feet of space spread out among three separate distribution operations into a single, 100,000 square foot facility. This new facility would feature a multi-level order selection system for general merchandise and slow-mover grocery items.

Office Depot

Project: New distribution facility in Fremont, CA

This new 350,000 square foot facility was designed to replace three smaller warehouses in Northern California. This was to be the first Office Depot facility to include an automated sorter in a mechanized order selection system. This facility needed to ship 9,500 orders a day on a 24 hour turn-around basis from an inventory of 20,000 SKU's. Orders were to ship to stores located in Northern and Central California and Reno, Nevada. The facility was designed also to serve seven smaller satellite distribution centers in the area, as well as meet the expansion needs due to Office Depot's rapid growth.

American Stores Company

Project: Consolidation of four distribution centers.

American Stores Co., parent company of the Lucky Stores and Savon chains, needed to consolidate the operations of four distribution centers in the Los Angeles area into one new and larger facility. The “merger” of the four separate operations into one location would provide for the standardization of operating procedures and increased operating efficiency.

We presented DPI with a nightmarish scenario. Our facility is old and irregularly shaped. It has low ceilings and big concrete columns every few feet. In addition, we couldn't stop working during the design, installation, implementation and training phases of this project. They did a superb job. Our processes are now faster, our productivity has increased immensely, while our error rate has been drastically reduced. Plus, we now have a distribution system that integrates all of our operations. If we had to do it all over, we would definately choose DPI again. They became our partners during this whole process. They were there every stop of the way.