Case Study: Brewers Distributor achieves rapid ROI and $450K annual savings with LANSA

Brewers Distributor Achieves Rapid Roi in Its Warehouse

Brewers Distributor Ltd. (BDL), Western Canada’s leading beer distributor handling nearly $1 billion in product annually, faced significant warehouse inefficiencies at its Vancouver facility: manual weighing and wrapping, slow picker workflows, and uncontrolled pick-slip dispatch that cost up to 100 lost man‑hours per day and prevented accurate measurement of picker performance while needing tighter integration with its JD Edwards ERP.

BDL implemented a LANSA-based Warehouse Automation System—using Visual LANSA Framework, LANSA Integrator, automated Samuel Strapping production lines, kiosks and SOAP web‑service links to JD Edwards and RedPrairie CALM. Delivered in under five months for $1.3M, the solution cut development time, delivered about $450K annual savings (payback <3 years), increased throughput ~25% (≈280 pallets/day), reduced pick errors to 3% within three months, and gave supervisors real‑time control and reliable productivity metrics.

Brewers' Distributor

Andrew Hobbs

Manager of IT applications