Overview
Bluegrass Supply Chain is a rapidly growing 3PL provider with locations across Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. Specializing in warehousing, order fulfillment, value-added services, and omnichannel solutions, the 3PL serves diverse customers across food and beverage, automotive, nutraceuticals, and consumer goods sectors.
The company’s commitment to “Work to Zero”—zero accidents, zero inefficiency, and zero environmental impact—drives continuous innovation in its operations. After implementing Deposco, Bluegrass transformed its ability to scale, slashing customer onboarding from months to weeks while maintaining the precision and service quality that clients demand. This operational agility has fueled aggressive growth, with the company aiming to double its footprint within five years.
Challenges
Bluegrass faced a critical constraint: the previous WMS couldn’t keep pace with growth ambitions. As a 3PL serving diverse customers with vastly different requirements, Bluegrass needed a platform that could flex and adapt quickly. Implementation cycles stretched 2-3 months from discovery through go-live, and any configuration change required the services of expensive external consultants. When customers requested customization—from label changes to specialized reporting—long lead times created competitive disadvantages.
The company identified three non-negotiables
for its next WMS:
- The flexibility to grow and change with customers rapidly
- The ability to configure solutions in-house without relying on consultants for every change
- Lightning-fast delivery on customer requests
The previous system limited what Bluegrass could provide customers and in its own operations, forcing reliance on external resources that slowed responsiveness to market opportunities.
Bluegrass also needed comprehensive scanning validation across its complex fulfillment environment, which ranged from B2C ecommerce to high-volume B2B operations moving 250,000 cases per customer monthly, plus integration capabilities for emerging automation technologies such as Locus Robotics cobots. Most critically, the inability to rapidly onboard new customers was becoming a competitive disadvantage in an industry where speed to market defines success.
Flexibility for us is key. As soon as we get something configured, the customer comes back with another idea. We have to have a software partner that is able to be flexible and deliver that pretty fast. They don’t want long lead times.
Solution
Partnering with Deposco directly addressed all three of the team’s non-negotiables and could match their ambition to scale aggressively.
Why Deposco Won:
- In-House Configuration Power: Bluegrass could make system changes internally without constantly contracting consultants. Deposco provides initial training, then enables teams to handle ongoing configuration independently—dramatically reducing costs and lead times while keeping customer costs down.
- Rapid Integration Capabilities: Robust API suite and pre-built sockets for NetSuite, SPS Commerce, UPS, and other platforms enabled seamless connectivity with diverse customer systems. This is critical for a 3PL serving clients on different platforms.
- Real-Time Dashboards: Built-in analytics and metrics displays provided instant visibility into operations across all facilities—a must-have feature that influenced selection.
- Scan-Based Accuracy: Comprehensive scanning workflows with pack validation prevented errors at every step, from picking through the final shipment.
- Flexible, Scalable Architecture: A cloud-based platform with modular integrations enabled Bluegrass to tailor solutions to each customer’s needs and budget, avoiding the one-size-fits-all approach that wouldn’t work for 80% of its clients.
- Automation-Ready: Native support for robotics integration, implemented with Locus Robotics cobots to reduce time, touch, and travel in the warehouse.
- Customer portal capabilities: Offering clients real-time inventory visibility and self-service order entry has become a sales differentiator for Bluegrass.
The selection also came down to partnership quality, Summers noted: “It’s one of the reasons why we switched from a previous WMS. We needed a partner that was going to grow with us and be there to service us. Deposco’s engineering team provides the rapid scoping, testing, and implementation support we need to deliver configurations as fast as customers need them.”
We need to be able to do a lot of these things ourselves within the system, and not always have to contract for that, or pay a large amount of money for a consultant.
Operational Excellence at Scale
Deposco’s scan-based workflows with pack validation transformed warehouse accuracy at Bluegrass. The system prevents errors before they happen by alerting workers to wrong products, locations, or lot numbers. The intuitive design also slashed training time. New team members become productive in days rather than weeks, saving thousands of dollars per hire. With Bluegrass launching new clients monthly, these compounding efficiency gains have proven substantial.
The operational improvements have directly enabled aggressive growth. Bluegrass achieved a 180% CAGR in their food and beverage business over the last couple of years while maintaining service quality. The 3PL is now launching new clients at a pace unthinkable with their previous system.
“We’ve been launching a new client every month this year. New team members are picking up on Deposco super fast,” Summers noted. With Deposco deployed at four facilities and plans to expand to 10-12 facilities over the next three years, Bluegrass is positioned to double in size within five years.
Results
Implementation Speed: Faster Time to Value
Bluegrass achieved its primary objective: dramatically faster customer onboarding. What previously took months from discovery through testing and implementation now happens in weeks.
Prior to having Deposco, it took us 2 to 3 months to implement a new solution for a customer. Now with Deposco, we’re able to do that in 3 to 4 weeks in most cases. Deposco’s integration Sockets and the API integration allow us to connect to things like NetSuite and SPS Commerce, and do that very quickly and very seamlessly for our customers.
This velocity has become a competitive differentiator, enabling Bluegrass to respond to RFPs and launch new customer relationships while competitors are still in the discovery phase.
Flexibility Delivers on Brand Promise
Flexibility is what’s going to continue the growth of our business. With Deposco, we can tune the system to what the client really needs and give it to them at a cost where they’re just paying for what they’re using. Then as that client grows, we can add on very quickly. If we were rigid, trying to put everybody into a one-system-fits-all, it wouldn’t work for probably 80% of our clients.
That flexibility, combined with rapid implementation, real-time accuracy, and a truly collaborative partnership, has transformed Bluegrass from capacity-constrained to growth-ready. With customer onboarding dramatically faster, training time slashed, and operational precision at unprecedented levels, Bluegrass is positioned to deliver on its brand promise: Grow Boldly. We’ll Deliver.
We’ve been launching a new client every month this year. New team members are picking up on Deposco super fast.
