locai Solutions today announced that PowerPick, their fulfillment management software, is being used to operate Angelo Caputo’s Fresh Markets new dedicated wareroom. In light of the explosive demand for online grocery from COVID-19, Caputo’s turned to their technology partner to take strain off a highly pressurized in-store pick operation and move towards a dedicated fulfillment model.
“At the beginning of the pandemic we were just trying to get orders out of the door,” said Matt Idstein, Head of Ecommerce for Caputo’s. “After a few days of incredible volume it became clear that our operating methods were not scalable and that we needed a new solution quickly or one of two things would happen: 1) out-of-stock rates would increase for both instore and online customers, or 2) employee burn out would be our demise.”
Highly familiar with the variety of fulfillment formats and micrologistics surrounding order management, locai’s COO and previous executive at Peapod, Scott DeGraeve, was able to offer operational guidance as Caputo’s quickly pivoted their strategy.
“Moving from in-store pick to a dedicated fulfillment area off the store floor was an immediate goal,” said DeGraeve. “Caputo’s already had an identified space, so working together we were able to set that up very quickly. This change alone will give them a 3x improvement in productivity, as well as provide a major increase in capacity to support their customer demand.”
PowerPick is able to support both in-store pick as well as wareroom pick, featuring multi-order picking and inventory management. PowerPick will give Caputo’s and their customers insight into real-time inventory, which means what’s shown on the site as available will also be verified as in-stock. This has the potential to significantly improve Caputo’s out-of-stock rates, and therefore shopper satisfaction.
By implementing PowerPick as their backend fulfillment automation, Caputo’s will be fully powered by locai’s technology suite. Locai launched Caputo’s eCommerce site in 2018, followed by their meal planning tool, The Recipe Rack, in 2019.
