Case Study · Operations & Leadership
DC Turnaround
Taking a multi-million-dollar distribution center from the bottom quartile of the company standings to tied for 4th of roughly 110 nationwide — by building a positive team culture first, then coaching 30 people to use their data tools every day.
- Tied 4th of ~110 DCs nationwide · top 5%
- +54.5% standings improvement
- −15% overtime expense
- +7.3% delivery-window success
The situation
I took over a multi-million-dollar distribution center sitting in the bottom quartile of its company-wide performance standings. Overtime was high, inventory variance was unexplained, and delivery windows were missed often enough that customers noticed. Nobody could see the problem in time to act on it — performance was something you learned about after the month closed.
Going on three years later, we're tied for 4th out of roughly 110 distribution centers nationwide — the top 5%.
What I did
Built the team first
Thirty people — hiring, mentoring, and training, and above all a positive, accountable culture where problems get raised on shift instead of discovered at month-end. Overtime doesn't drop 15% because a report says it should. It drops because supervisors trust the numbers, the crew trusts the supervisors, and people speak up early.
Day to day that meant huddles and team meetings, one-on-ones, and getting to know every person in the building. When we missed, I brought the team the hard data and treated it as our opportunity to improve — never a reason to scold.
Made the tools the team's own
The building already had Power BI and Excel; they just weren't part of how the team worked. I coached supervisors to use Power BI for daily order monitoring, so disruptions surfaced the morning they happened, and to plan each shift in Excel the same way with the same inputs. Streamlined workflows and that shared planning lifted warehouse efficiency roughly 10%. The metrics that mattered — fill, on-time windows, labor hours against volume — became something the team looked at together and steered by.
Attacked the cost line
The lever that mattered most was planning ahead: using the Power BI planners and Excel tools proactively, before the shift, and helping the team trust that it actually improves their day. That cut overtime expense 15% while inventory variance improved — the two numbers that usually move in opposite directions when a DC is under pressure.
Fixed delivery reliability
Driver training, manifest analysis, and tighter DOT compliance raised route-delivery window success 7.3%. Analysis pointed at which routes and which handoffs were failing; the training closed them.
The how-to version, with what I'd tell another GM, is in the DC turnaround playbook.
Figures are the relative performance improvements reported on my résumé. No employer-internal data, reporting, or systems are reproduced here.