At Denver Wholesale Foods, inventory never sits still for long.
As a closeout food distributor, products move in and out constantly. Partial pallets are condensed and relocated throughout the day. New items replace old ones almost immediately, and locations are always being adjusted as space is condensed and reused. In a warehouse built around opportunity buying, their operation runs on constant change.
For years, their team managed all of that inventory movement with paper pick sheets. These pick sheets were generated using a custom report that would be printed and handed off to the warehouse team. They were thoughtful and tailored to their needs, but dependent on something that could not keep up.
“As soon as you print off a piece of paper, it’s no longer alive,” Christian, the Sales Manager at Denver, explained.
If products were moved, the pick sheet did not show it. Pickers had to make judgment calls in the moment, and those decisions did not always land correctly.
“We were getting a tremendous amount of mispicks,” Christian said.
Those mistakes created friction everywhere. Warehouse staff spent time tracking down issues instead of moving orders forward. The office team had to manage credits and corrections. Customers felt the inconsistency downstream. The pace and complexity of the operation had simply outgrown that paper process.
They needed a mobile, warehouse-friendly solution that gave them better visibility and live information. So, together with Koble’s customization team, they built a custom, web-based order-picking app that connects directly to EBMS.
With this app and barcode scanners, pickers now work from live data instead of static sheets, verifying every item as it is pulled. Locations and quantities update in real time as changes happen throughout the day.
“If it’s not there, they just refresh the app, and it shows the new location,” Christian said.
Within the first month of using the app, Denver Wholesale saw a 70% reduction in mispicks and an 80% reduction in the costs associated with those mistakes.
The team is no longer reacting to errors as frequently, which creates a more consistent and reliable experience for their customers.
Removing the Manual Gaps
One of the most challenging parts of their previous process involved catch-weight items, such as meat and cheese, where every case has a different weight.
It required a fully manual workflow in which pickers wrote down weights by hand, often while working in cold environments with thick gloves. Those chicken-scratch sheets were passed along to the office, where someone had to manually total the weights before invoicing.
“We would just look on the cases and write down the weight off of each case manually. If it was a six-hundred-case order, then you had to write down six hundred weights.”
The process was slow and difficult to verify. Missing or unclear information created more opportunities for mistakes, and fixing those issues after the fact was time-consuming.
“Once we brought barcode scanners and the order-picking app into the picture, we were able to get the case weight right off the barcode, as well as all of the other pieces of information we needed, like the product ID,” Christian explained. “We just scan the case, and the app collects the data and passes it through to EBMS.
“It certainly made things a whole lot faster, but the biggest benefit was accuracy for us.”
Not a One-Time Fix
The order-picking app has continued to evolve over time, expanding from live inventory visibility into barcode verification, catch-weight tracking, and other process improvements that better support the way their warehouse actually runs.
“We keep adding layers to it,” Christian said. “Once you solve one problem, you start seeing other opportunities to improve things too.”
Denver Wholesale plans to continue building on what they have started, working alongside Koble’s customization team to refine workflows, improve visibility, and remove friction wherever it slows the operation down.
If your team is relying on spreadsheets, paper processes, or workarounds that no longer keep up with the pace of the business, it may be time to ask a simple question: What would your operation look like if your systems worked the way your team actually works?
Koble’s customization team can help improve visibility, automate sluggish manual workflows, and better align your processes with the pace of your business. Reach out to your Account Manager to start the conversation.
Haley is part of the marketing team at Koble Systems, where she enjoys sharing the stories of the many amazing businesses Koble works with. From trade show floors to client forums, she helps highlight how better systems really do lead to better business, more productive teams, and stronger communities. When she’s not producing content, Haley is found pouring mediocre latte art, trying to convince her husband of the validity of something she learned from an instagram reel, and trying, by the grace of God, to train up her child in the way she should go.
