The Situation: A Symphony of Disconnected Parts
A leading distributor to independent grocers across the Midwest was facing a pivotal moment. They were navigating a high-stakes transition from their legacy NCR Power Warehouse WMS to a modern Infor Cloud environment. Meanwhile, they needed to integrate voice, labeling, and material handling equipment across three distinct sites without breaking their operation.
This wasn’t just a software upgrade… it was a breeding ground for systems chaos.
To add to the cacophony, multiple vendors at the table oversold promises and provided unrealistic timelines that were falling through.Â
This massive go-live was at risk — not because of the outcomes the client was hoping to achieve, but because of the noisy environment of disconnected technologies and misaligned vendor support.
They needed a Maestro.
The Solution: Orchestration through Collaboration
Mountain Leverage, the client’s existing voice solution partner, stepped in not just to deploy new devices, but to orchestrate the project holistically.Â
Instead of approaching each edge technology and each integration as another silo within the grocery distributor’s ecosystem, Mountain Leverage brought a Work Orchestration™ philosophy to the forefront, advocating for connected systems and championing the client’s desired outcomes across every aspect of the project.
Workflow Harmony: We utilized Ascend™, our intelligent orchestration layer, to sit between the host systems and the dynamic edge of their warehouse floor, harmonizing the following elements into a single, seamless ecosystem:
- Voice picking triggered labeling and printing on-demand – eliminating the friction of pre-printing and manual matching.
- Lighted double pallet jacks were optimized through voice workflows. When a picker speaks a command, the pallet jack lights up to indicate the correct position, reducing cognitive load and error rates.
- Complex logic – including catch weights, combining assignments that can be shipped together, or smart batching assignments to reduce travel time – was managed within Ascend™, ensuring that human judgment would be supported by system precision.
- Labor data dashboards gave leadership visibility into efficiency and performance that was previously trapped in the “black hole” of legacy reporting.
Crystal-Clear Partnership: While other integrators added chaos, Mountain Leverage’s commitment to transparency helped all parties cut through the noise and realign expectations, timelines, and outcomes. Mountain Leverage’s orchestration approach gave this grocery distribution client confidence in the implementation expertise, knowing that their specific needs were handled by the orchestration layer, not hard-coded into a rigid WMS.
The Outcome: Regaining Sovereignty
By adopting a Work Orchestration™ philosophy, this grocery distributor achieved clarity where there was once chaos.
They didn’t buy a new system; they partnered with a guide to orchestrate their future. By unifying the edge, liberating their data, and conducting operations with Mountain Leverage’s strong and steady support, the warehouse leaders have now positioned their business to scale efficiently.Â
Instead of being dictated by their systems and vendors, they moved from managing technology to conducting their strategy… like a Maestro.
