For many companies, finding growth is the biggest challenge.

Custom Marketing Services, a third party logistics (3PL) provider in Calera, Ala., had the opposite problem. The company needed to efficiently grow its materials handling capabilities to keep up with sales that were growing by leaps and bounds.

In 2001, the company dedicated 10,000 square feet of a 150,000 square foot facility to the distribution of home décor and entertainment products marketed directly to consumers through home parties. Within two years, the party plan/direct selling business was using the entire 150,000 square feet—and it still wasn't enough.

To keep up with growth, Custom Marketing worked with a systems integrator (Forte, 513-398-2800) to build a new 500,000 square foot facility that could help to take the company to the next level of growth and efficiency.

"We wanted a system that could handle the business we have today and continue to grow with our customer," says Walter LaGroue, chief operating officer of the company. "We simply could not continue to run a manual operation out of 150,000 square feet and provide the service we needed to provide."

Automation, like 3.5 miles of conveyor and sortation, has transformed Custom Marketing's 500,000 sq. ft. facility.

The combination of increased space and automated materials handling has resulted in a nearly 30% reduction in labor even as order volume increased by 50%. Order turn-around time improved from a high of more than three weeks to less than 48 hours.

What's more, the system is capable of handling a 500% increase in throughput during a three-year period.

Managing growth has been part of Custom Marketing's story since the company opened in 1991. Then, says LaGroue, the 3PL provided repackaging services to the supermarket promotion industry.

When an in-store promotion of a product like dinnerware was over, Custom Marketing would remove the unsold inventory from a grocery store, inspect it, refurbish it, repack it and ship it back to the supplier or on to another customer.

Once picked, orders travel to a packing lane where items are packed in shipping containers, taped, check weighed and labeled for shipment.

In a year, operations expanded from 7,500 square feet to 64,000 square feet. In addition, Custom Marketing purchased another building from one of its customers and took over its logistics operations.

In 2000, the company built a 150,000 square foot facility on its present campus. About that time, they also began providing distribution to the party plan/direct selling industry. These customers market their products directly to consumers through home parties. Within two years, that business occupied the entire facility for picking and packing operations and used outside facilities for remote storage.

While it got the job done, the system was inefficient. "We had a tremendous head-count, with up to 350 employees during the busiest season," says LaGroue. "Our people had clipboards and were picking to grocery store shopping carts. For a big order, they might have to chain three carts together."

During the busiest times, Custom Marketing was running two shifts because the aisles were too congested to replenish and pick at the same time.

Meeting customer quality requirements called for a time-consuming auditing process. "We were at an accurate enough level for our customer, but we had to correct a lot of mistakes," says LaGroue.

Something had to change. The new facility was designed with three goals in mind.

After packing, cartons travel by conveyor to an automatic taping and weigh station for a final quality check before being sorted to shipping lanes.

The second was to design a system that could accurately handle the growing business but use less labor. "We knew we needed to automate to become more efficient and to become more accurate with less work," says LaGroue.

Finally, the company wanted to plan for the future, since its customer's growth goals were aggressive. That meant installing four pick modules. The next step was to add a best-of-breed WMS that could scale as the business grew.

On all counts, the system has been a success. Turnaround times that were once weeks are down to days.

The system is also flexible enough to allow Custom Marketing to bring in resources from one of the other buildings on campus to smoothly handle the busiest periods. Quality has also improved.

The final measure of success, however, might be the fact that Custom Marketing is adding new customers in the original 150,000 square foot facility. "But instead of the manual operation it once was, it's now an automated system just like the one in the 500,000 square foot facility," says LaGroue. "We're ready to grow with them too."