Logistics Warehouse increases daily production by 45% with Site Visibility

Key takeaways

Logistics Warehouse is headquartered in Fort Smith, AR and offers transportation, product manipulation, and warehousing services across a nine state region. They have over 600,000 square feet of warehousing space that provides food grade storage, as well as repacking services. Their mission is to provide quality services with exceptional efficiency and to always exceed expectations for their customers. 

• Deployed Samsara's Site Visibility solution across 3 warehouses totaling 600,000+ square feet, gaining better visibility into their operations

• Installed Samsara Vehicle Gateways and AI Dash Cams across their fleet, helping improve efficiency, safety, and customer satisfaction

• Increased daily production by 45% by optimizing product line workflows with Site Visibility, leading to an 8% increase in weekly profit margins

Logistics Warehouse relies on Site Visibility to help them gain better visibility into their sites and improve operational efficiency.

• ↓ Logistics Warehouse <a href="#section-one">increases efficiency and reduces unplanned downtime</a> by implementing remote time studies and setting up inactivity alerts on their production lines.

• ↓ Floor managers are empowered with <a href="#section-two">intelligent search tools to improve processes and safety practices</a> and ensure not only that the production lines meet their daily goals, but also that the workers are operating in a safe environment.

• ↓Logistics Warehouse is able to <a href="#section-three">increase customer satisfaction with real-time visibility,</a> giving their operations director clear insights into what products are shipping out and when.

“We kept finding new things to look at with the cameras—new insights and things to improve. The system just makes sense. We’re already seeing major improvements in efficiency.”

RONNIE ROBERTSON, PRESIDENT

Prior to Samsara, Logistics Warehouse had limited visibility and control into their fleet and on-site operations. Their unreliable legacy solution would routinely malfunction and was a black box, providing little to no visibility into their warehouses and workforce. For Logistics Warehouse, choosing the right IoT solution to manage their fleet and site operations was about remote management, efficiency insights, and advanced visibility, which is why they chose Samsara. With the Connected Operations Platform offering visibility into their entire operations, Logistics Warehouse can remotely monitor all their operations through a simple web-based dashboard, enabling them to be more strategic and proactive through improved processes that reduce downtime.

<div id="section-one">Increasing efficiency and reducing unplanned downtime</div>

Ronnie Robertson, the President of Logistics Warehouse, used to spend five minutes every day at each packing station to understand workflows and identify opportunities to improve processes. However, this often impacted employee behavior and rarely presented an accurate view of how production lines operate on a day-to-day basis.

With the Samsara Site Visibility solution, Robertson can get a holistic view of his factory operations anytime and anywhere via the mobile application or web dashboard. This enables Robertson to monitor footage of workflows throughout specific timespans, set alerts for detections or inactivity, and get a more accurate feel of workforce productivity when he can't physically be present. 

Robertson has already identified a few production line inefficiencies that cause brief, yet notable, downtime. For one particular line, Robertson setup Inactivity Alerts, which allow him to define an area of interest on a camera stream and receive alerts if there is no motion for a certain time period. Now, if there is an unplanned pause in the production line, a site manager will be notified and a staff member can quickly perform detailed checks. With these few adjustments, the team’s workflow is better organized, such that they produce 45% more cases a day, increasing their profit margins by 8%. 

"There are very few solutions that allow you to instantly monitor trucks and warehouses at the same time, while also being anywhere you want to be."

RONNIE ROBERTSON, PRESIDENT

<div id="section-two">Improving processes and safety practices with intelligent search</div>

Efficiency and accuracy are an essential part of Logistics Warehouses’ business model. They might bid against three or four different companies for a project, so creativity in safely reducing production cycles is one of the ways they stand out and provide stellar customer service. 

At their manipulation facilities, time is money; much of the work done is measured in cents, but when operating at Logistics Warehouse’s scale, even just a few minutes of downtime can quickly add up and become costly. With Stream Search—one of Site Visibility's powerful AI search tools that allows users to retroactively search for people or motion within a defined area—their team can better train mid-level managers on workflow improvements. Stream Search helps them easily identify clips and coach managers on reducing downtime, ensuring proper PPE is worn at all times, and more.

Todd Bolton, Repacking Operations Manager, oversees 20-70 workers at a time, which means he is responsible not only for their safety, but also for ensuring that the repack line meets daily production goals. Through a bird’s-eye camera view, Bolton noticed there was a bottleneck in an assembly line and workers were idly waiting for other people to finish their part of the product before starting their own part. With Stream Search, he could quickly identify if people were overcrowding the production line, save the clips, and then share the footage with his team to improve their processes.

“I don’t have a lot of time to spend learning new technologies, which is why my favorite thing about Site Visibility is that it is super easy to use. Finding and sharing footage is simple and the payoff is beyond the production line.”

TODD BOLTON, REPACKING OPERATIONS MANAGER

For Bolton, the simplicity of Site Visibility means that with a single platform, he can easily grab footage to answer questions from upper management, as well as train his workforce on safety procedures.

<div id="section-three">Increasing customer satisfaction with real-time visibility </div>

Chris Morland, Director of Operations, finds Samsara’s integrated solutions incredibly helpful for monitoring fleet and warehouse operations. Prior to Samsara, if he needed to review footage or investigate claims, he often found the cameras he needed were broken or the asset trackers he used were out of batteries. 

Prior to Samsara, Logistics Warehouse used rental car trackers (which have short battery lifespans) for tracking their fleet. Trucks would disappear without eye witnesses or any ability to track them. In a single theft, Logistics Warehouse could pay up to $15,000 to cover the cost of lost vehicles, equipment, and product. Now, with Samsara, Logistics Warehouse can track trucks, drivers, and deliveries through the dashboard in real time and leverage Site Visibility to visually confirm which products were loaded onto which truck. This helps them improve their end-to-end operations and ensure their customers are satisfied with on-time and accurate deliveries.

Now, Morland is able to monitor and manage all his operations—from fleet to factory floor—simply by toggling within the Samsara dashboard. Management can authorize more users within their organization to access this advanced visibility, from staff to executives, and can provision specific viewing rights to these team members so that individuals have visibility into only what is most relevant to them. 

“We kept finding new things to look at with the cameras—new insights and things to improve. The system just makes sense. We’re already seeing major improvements in efficiency.”

RONNIE ROBERTSON, PRESIDENT

A future with Samsara

Since deploying Samsara, Logistics Warehouse has been able to gain greater visibility and more control over their operations. Through a single dashboard, their team is able to increase efficiency, reduce operational costs, and be more proactive and strategic with their operations. 

Logistics Warehouse is growing at an unbelievable rate, and they look to Samsara to help them be more efficient, intelligent, and safe throughout this expansion.