Food logistics is a tough business for any warehouse operator, but especially for a mid-market, asset-owning third-party logistics (3PL) provider whose core focus is perishables.

Customers range from single commodity shipments to home delivery meal kits. Fruits and vegetables have different shelf lives, grades, temperature requirements and compliance standards. As orders constantly change, needs for special storage and value-added services change. Warehouses need to be ready with the services needed, including with billing systems that are able to capture costs dynamically.

The Ohio-based Castellini Group of Companies is a regional 3PL offering cold-chain transportation and distribution services throughout the eastern U.S., employing its own trucks via a 200,000-square foot regional distribution warehouse outside Cincinnati. Its core business includes shipping and storing refrigerated produce, as well as managing fulfillment for companies that make and deliver home meal kits. 

Castellini’s legacy WMS was falling behind in handling different customer needs in different parts of the warehouse and, importantly, capturing the associated costs in its billing system, given frequent order changes and add-on demands. 

Bolt-on application programming interfaces, designed mainly to add automation and optimization capability for omnichannel retail, weren’t enough; cold-chain distribution, especially for fresh and frozen produce, entails added layers of time-sensitive special handling and risk, and operational slip-ups can mean not only a missed delivery, but also spoilage in transit or an e-coli outbreak. 

The company began shopping for a new vendor to “rip and replace” its WMS. It settled on Florida-based Datex Corp. Itself a mid-market provider, Datex offers WMS software-as-a-service (SaaS) to a niche market of 3PLs and warehouse operators in cold chain and other specialized fulfillment segments with complex operations in highly regulated environments. 

Find out more about Castellini’s journey and how Datex’s Footprint WMS platform orchestrates inventory and labor and dynamically tracks pricing for a complex, demanding warehouse segment.