How a 3PL Scaled Up with VeraCore’s Smart Automation

The Company

Established in 2008, Elevate Fulfillment is a leading full-service 3PL company dedicated to providing premium fulfillment services minus the hefty price tag. They’ve spent the last 15 years learning the ins and outs of the e-commerce industry and working closely with their customers to ensure they succeed.

The Challenge

Elevate started small, running their warehouse in Idaho off 3PL Central’s software. But as business took off, they realized that their current software lacked certain key features their growing company needed. Automation was one such feature – more orders were coming in, with some clients doing around 3,000 orders a day during peak season. However, processes like order batching were still being done manually.

“The problem with order volumes like that was that we didn’t have the capability or data to handle them efficiently,” explained Rick Hone, General Manager at Elevate Fulfillment. “The only way we had to print orders was chronologically. So, we had to have one person on the team to go through all the incoming orders and manually sort and batch them together.” As orders increased, having too many manual touch points caused things to slow down and led to greater inefficiency. Elevate was forced to compensate with additional skilled labor and time.

The tipping point came when Elevate was preparing to open another facility in California. Ideally, the company would use the same system to run both warehouses. But the software they were using at the time lacked multi-facility functionality, which meant the team would have to manage the two warehouses separately or find another solution to help them grow. They chose the latter.

The Solution

The team started looking for options that would allow automation and multi-facility functionality to support their growth. “We vetted six different software options, but VeraCore was the only one that hit the three things we wanted: great functionality, a fair price, and an experienced team that understood the ins and outs of working in the 3PL industry,” Rick said.

In fact, it was the support and knowledge from VeraCore’s team that sealed the deal for Elevate. “When we started shopping around for options, I realized that some of the vendors we talked to weren’t familiar with terms like lot control,” Rick shared. “But the VeraCore team was, and they were very honest about what their software could do for us. These guys have been in the industry for over 40 years; they truly understood what it meant to run a 3PL business. ” Rick talked about how the VeraCore team was also fully hands-on during the onboarding process, helping Elevate migrate their entire system and familiarizing them with the intricacies of the fully configurable software.

In 2019, Elevate opened its new warehouse in California with VeraCore’s Smart Fulfillment software and, within a couple of months, was running both facilities on one platform.

With VeraCore, Elevate was able to streamline its operations, replacing formerly manual steps with rules-based automated decision-making, and speeding up fulfillment. They quickly noticed big improvements, particularly in order management. VeraCore’s intelligent automation feature allowed the team to define rules such as grouping orders by BOM, like orders and shipping carrier, so that when orders started coming in, they would already be grouped correctly.

Offloading this decision-making to the software allowed the team to focus on completing one task at a time with quick, repeatable steps. For example, pickers now had easy-to-follow batch picks, and packers could quickly and confidently pack batches of identical orders at a time, allowing the team at Elevate to move more orders out the door faster.

“We didn’t need to dedicate a full-time staff just for batching and printing orders anymore,” Rick said. “Thanks to the time we saved after setting up proper, rules-based pick streams, we reduced the labor needed by half. For our high-volume clients, we’ve managed to cut labor needed by 75% thanks to VeraCore.”

The Result

Six months in, Elevate decided to change its operational processes to take full advantage of VeraCore’s features. “We realized that the software was set up to keep your operations in line and optimized with everything else that goes on in the warehouse. So, we decided to embrace the change and went through every step, every process and brought everything together into one complete and highly efficient system,” Rick explained.

It paid off for the team. Billing was one of those processes that were changed: instead of taking 10 full days to bill customers, the team could now do it in one.

It also helped them do more with fewer people. The Great Resignation saw high labor shortages across the country, with 47.4 million workers leaving their jobs in 2021. But Elevate continued operating despite facing a high turnover rate thanks to their optimized processes. “It didn’t matter if people came in for just a week or were there for a month,” Rick said. “Because by that time, we had pretty bulletproof processes in place that helped us be flexible about how many people we needed on the floor and helped us train new workers quickly.”

Elevate was a small warehouse that started to grow rapidly over the last five years. They had hit a wall with their previous software, but VeraCore allowed them to take on more clients, do more on less labor, and get more orders out the door each day.

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