Growth without chaos
A Brooklyn-based food distributor operated successfully for over 40 years as a family-run business.
In 2019, new investors came in to accelerate growth — and quickly exposed a reality many companies face.
👉 Manual warehouse processes don’t scale.
They were distributing over 100 brands, 4,000+ active SKUs, 1,500+ special-order items, and products with short shelf lives and strict food-safety requirements.
Their priorities were clear:
✔ Traceability
✔ FIFO & expiration control
✔ Inventory visibility
✔ Fulfillment accuracy
They started by implementing Sage 300 as the core ERP to centralize finance and operations.
That solved part of the problem.
To handle day-to-day warehouse execution, GraniteWMS was added to manage live picking, stock rotation, expiry tracking, and warehouse optimization — fully integrated with Sage 300.
The results were tangible:
✔ Full traceability by lot, location, and expiry
✔ Accurate FIFO and shelf-life management
✔ Fewer picking errors and customer returns
✔ Clear inventory visibility for sales and customers
✔ Productivity gains — doing the work of ~90 people with ~60
But one of the most interesting outcomes came outside the warehouse.
The company delivered using its own truck fleet.
Once Sage 300 was live, we leveraged user-defined fields and minimal custom logic to build delivery routes and schedules directly inside the ERP.
With rapid deployment and very little programming, Sage 300 became a routing and delivery planning platform.
The result:
✔ Fleet reduced from 12 trucks to 10
✔ Minimal investment
✔ Significant ongoing cost savings
Most importantly, they gained confidence in their data and processes — something that’s hard to put a price on when you’re scaling fast.
This is why I continue to see Sage 300 succeed in real-world distribution environments.
It doesn’t have to do everything — but when paired with the right extensions, it adapts to the business instead of forcing the business to adapt to it.
If you’re growing, bringing in investors, or feeling the strain of manual processes, real case scenarios matter more than software buzzwords.
Happy to have that conversation.
