The Building Fit the Business.
The Business Moved.
One DC or three, insourced or outsourced — the network decision is expensive to get wrong and slow to reverse.
Supply Chain Strategy
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Interim Leadership
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Project Management
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Distribution Network Strategy
Most network decisions arrive as a symptom rather than a question. A lease is coming up. Freight cost is climbing faster than volume. A channel has outgrown the node serving it. Service is slipping in one region and holding everywhere else. Or the building simply ran out of room, and the only options anyone has priced are a bigger building or another shift.
The underlying question is usually the same: how many buildings should this business have, where should they be, and what should each one serve. That question sits above the floor. Slotting and travel paths make a building faster, but no amount of optimization fixes a network pointed at the wrong map.
The versions of this that show up in mid-market operations are consistent. A company coming off a 3PL and standing up its own DC for the first time. An operation that has outgrown a single building and has to decide between expanding it, adding a second, or relocating entirely. Two networks bolted together after an acquisition, each still running its own logic. Or a footprint that made sense at a previous volume and quietly stopped making sense two years ago.
The work runs from the question to the move. Model the network against real cost-to-serve rather than assumed rates. Evaluate sites against what the operation actually needs — labor market, inbound and outbound lanes, building specification, room to grow. Design the layout and the flow for the volume you are going to have, not the volume you have now. Then run the transition: sequence the move, protect inventory accuracy through it, and get the new building producing before the old one closes.
That last part is where most network projects come apart. The analysis is the easy half. Standing up a building and moving a live operation into it, without losing a season, is the half that requires someone who has done it.
Network modeling at this scale does not need a research department. It needs someone who can read the data, walk the candidate buildings, and tell you which model will survive contact with a real labor market on a real Monday.
