Managers of cold storage facilities all face the same challenge: they want to store the most stock in the least amount of space, while still maintaining safe and convenient access to every item.
One of those managers is Dave Tripicchio, head operations manager at the Louis Glunz Beer distributorship in Chicago. Founded in 1888, the Glunz distributorship deals in beers from hundreds of breweries around the world, maintaining access to 2400 SKUs at any given time. Effectively managing that many SKUs in a beer cooler demands a commitment to quality and an organizational space between to match, and much of that responsibility rests with the operations department.
The distributorship owners were dissatisfied with their cooler storage situation. The cold storage warehouse had about 250 feet of static racking, four levels high, and extra kegs would often get set in front of the racks. In order to get a keg off any particular rack, staff would first need to clear a path through kegs stored in front of them. “We’d get the beer in and find a place for it to sit safely, and hopefully we’d rotate it in the proper order and no one would get hurt,” Tripicchio said.
The system was inefficient, and they realized that something needed to change.