St. Paul, Minn.-based Co-op Partners Warehouse may specialize in selling fresh fruits and vegetables, but customers will soon find out that ordering from them is a piece of cake.
The co-op already has installed a Prophet warehouse management operating system and plans to launch an online order program early next year, said James Collins, senior director of supply chain.
The Prophet system allows product to be tracked through the warehouse, improving picking accuracy and enabling fruits and vegetables to be rotated on a first-in, first-out basis, Collins said.
The online order system coming next year will improve accuracy of order entry and enable customers to create their own templates so they can easily recreate orders or save components of an order for future use.
The system also will help forecasting for buying purposes and reduce out-of-stocks, he said.
Installing the new warehouse system has had its glitches, Collins said, “But when we’ve worked through all the kinks, it will be a significantly better system and offer better service for all of our customers.”
The company has added air scrubbers to its coolers to purify the air as well.
“If you remove ethylene from the air, it slows down the ripening process, which means customers get a fresher product,” he said.
Co-op Partners also has replaced the traditional plastic flaps from the entrances to some of its coolers with high-speed rollup doors to better control the temperature and humidity.
“We used to see a 10-degree temperature variation,” Collins said. “Now it’s 1 or 2 degrees.”
New to the co-op
The co-op also has made a couple of staff additions: logistics manager David Nordine, most recently an information system technician with the U.S. Navy; and system administrator Sean Murphy, formerly a global transportation and logistics consultant for the Estee Lauder Cos.
