One of Puerto Rico’s largest distributors, the company supplies beverage, food, household, personal care, and pet goods across the island and is renowned for setting standards of performance and integrity in distribution. When unprecedented customer demand and rapidly changing market conditions arrived at once, that reputation was tested: the operation had to stay competitive and satisfy diverse, shifting customer needs at a pace it had not faced before.

Inside the warehouse, the nature of the work had changed. The pick makeup had moved from primarily pallet-picking to mostly case-picking, a far more labor-intensive profile, and performance had not adjusted to it. The facility lacked discipline in its processes and was missing several methods needed to manage the warehouse efficiently. That inefficiency forced the company to hire additional employees just to keep up, driving overall operating cost higher.

The deeper problem was that leadership could not see the business clearly or lead it consistently. The distribution center had few performance metrics to manage by, and the information it did report was often inaccurate, so decisions ran on a thin and unreliable picture. The leadership team did not engage well with employees from a culture standpoint, there were no formal meetings to set expectations, and supervisors held no accountability to the workforce. With demand forecasts expecting a decrease as pandemic-related benefits ended, the distributor needed a system that would hold up through changing volume, not a one-time push.

POWERS started by evaluating the critical areas of the distribution center for improvement, working across inbound, picking, outbound, and warehouse layout. That gave a clear, fact-based view of where the operation was losing ground and which methods and routines the warehouse needed to manage the new, case-heavy pick profile efficiently rather than absorb it with more headcount.

Several workstreams advanced in parallel. POWERS developed frontline leadership coaching protocols so leaders engaged more effectively with their teams, set expectations, and held the floor accountable. It created a staffing plan by work area to manage personnel and overtime, designed so departments could flex employees into other areas as demand moved, directly attacking the cost that inefficiency had been adding. At the same time, POWERS determined the KPIs needed to actually measure performance, including productivity, carrier on-time arrival, and picking accuracy, and implemented a metrics tracking and management system to make that information accurate and visible.

Together, the changes replaced an undisciplined, metric-poor operation with one that could see itself clearly and lead consistently. Productivity climbed across receiving, picking, and outbound, overtime came down as staffing flexed to where the work was, and the distributor gained the metrics and leadership routines to keep improving even as demand forecasts shifted with the end of pandemic-related benefits.