Field Notes
Distribution is a truth business: there is a physical fact of where every item, truck, and pallet is, and there is what the systems believe. The spread between those two is where margin dies — as expedites, safety stock, missed SLAs, and the annual peak-season near-death experience. Transformation in this sector means closing that spread, warehouse by warehouse, partner by partner.
Why the estate got here
No distributor chose this architecture. The WMS was right when it was installed; ten years of customer-specific customizations made it unupgradable. EDI accreted one trading-partner mandate at a time until the mappings became load-bearing folklore. Paper survived in the four walls because hardware budgets are easy to cut and the cost of bad scans is invisible on any single day. It all works — at last year’s volume. The business, meanwhile, is signing enterprise customers whose SLAs assume this year’s.
The order of operations
We sequence the same way every time, because physics doesn’t vary: accuracy, then visibility, then optimization. Inventory accuracy and scan compliance come first — no algorithm survives bad location data. Last-mile and SLA visibility come second, so risk is seen at dispatch, not at the complaint. Only then do forecasting and dynamic routing earn their keep, because now they’re fed by data the building actually believes. AI deployed in the reverse order is how distributors end up with expensive dashboards nobody trusts.
Peak season as the proof
Every engagement in this sector aims at one demonstration: the next peak season running as an operations exercise instead of a heroic rescue. That’s the moment the board understands what changed — when volume spikes and the network bends instead of breaking. A Sherpa who has run distribution technology through real peaks embeds with your team a few days a week, gets you there in under a year, and hands the playbook to a permanent leader.