Accellos, a provider of supply chain execution software, announced a new case study featuring Columbia Colstor. The Moses Lake WA-based company moves more than 60 billion pounds of refrigerated, frozen, and dry inventory each year.
With so many customers having needs as diverse as cross-docking, packaging, repackaging, product stamping, and load scanning, Columbia Colstor needed a 3PL (third-party logistics) system with strong out-of-the-box functionality. The company found it in AccellosOne Enterprise 3PL. Within just 30 days of installing the software at its first warehouse, inventory accuracy rates climbed to 99.999% and employee productivity increased 500 pounds per person per day.
With 50 million cubic feet of storage space, 460 employees, six strategically located warehouses, and hundreds of trucks and railcars coming and going day and night, Columbia Colstor ranks #16 on the International Association of Refrigerated Warehouses 2012 Global Top 25 List.
To improve operations in 2006, Columbia Colstor installed a warehouse management system (WMS). In 2007, when industry consolidation resulted in the software company being acquired twice in the one year, Columbia Colstor’s operations began to suffer. Then in 2009, the software’s new parent company introduced a new WMS, making matters worse. In fact, Columbia Colstor was still struggling to get the software up and running three years later.
Something had to quickly change. In March 2012, Columbia Colstor launched a formal software review process. The competition went head to head, answering questions, providing data, and demonstrating their software. The scoring system used by Columbia Colstor indicated a clear winner: AccellosOne Enterprise 3PL, a hosted, cloud-based system.
