Southwind Foods

Successful Food Distribution Automation Using WiSys Warehouse Management

Southwind Foods has experienced rapid growth since their start in 1999, expanding into a national supplier of seafood and meats to many grocery operations around the nation. Southwind processes and distributes a very high volume of seafood every single day. To facilitate their growth and long-term profitability, Southwind Foods constructed two massive frozen storage facilities in Los Angeles in 2015 and consolidated operations into those larger facilities. This substantially reduced their need for outside cold storage facilities and substantially reduced their costs.

To manage a facility of this size, Southwind needed to:

• Create an automated stocking and fulfillment system
• Include put-away logic, pallet management and order picking logic
• Make these activities streamlined and pain-free.

Their system needs to know exactly where everything is always to support FIFO rotation, shelf life, country of origin, and other critical information, all in done in real-time

To support all of this, Southwind Foods needed to:

• Add an Advanced Warehouse Management System (WMS) to their ERP system
• Implement Wi-Fi throughout the facility
• Utilize bar code scanners that could operate in sub-zero temperatures

To solve these challenges The Attivo Group worked closely with WiSys LLC, a close partner and preferred provider of WMS Systems that integrate with Macola and SAP Business One ERP systems. By working together, they designed and implemented an enhanced Warehouse Management System to handle put-away, pallet management, and order picking tailored to the specific requirements of Southwind Foods. Attivo also brought in Emkat, Inc. to handle the intricacies of the wireless infrastructure that the system would run on. Honeywell provided the scanner equipment designed to function in -10 ° temperatures.

The facility moves and deployment of the warehouse management system was completed in 2016. Sales growth has continued, and the company has a very solid infrastructure to enable their success and increase profitability. The pallet management system, enhanced to support the unique requirements for put away and pick logic in a challenging environment, has proven to be a durable and game-changing technology.

Said Don Sutherland (then CFO of Southwind Foods) “This custom-tailored system is now the backbone of our company’s operations. It is extremely efficient and accurate, and we rely on it to support the high volume of product that we handle every day. It keeps us totally compliant with all of the regulatory and customer requirements that we need to deal with and has helped us keep our costs as low as possible.”