D&H Streamlines Southeast Operations, Opens Atlanta Warehouse

D&H Co-President Michael Schwab said the warehouse will service D&H accounts in the Southeast and parts of the Midwest. D&H hopes to drive down freight costs due to streamlined shipments, Schwab added.

The Atlanta warehouse will effectively consolidate all operations from D&H's current facilities in Dallas and Jacksonville, Fla.

"You can identify where you would want to open warehouse locations to support your customer base, and we've gone through that exercise," said Schwab in a Channelweb interview. "It's been almost a two-year project whereby we looked at our facilities and how our business has transformed over time. We didn't have the tech infrastructure in place in Dallas and Jacksonville, nor were those [facilities] capable of scaling in size. So they were limited in their useful life."

The consolidation means D&H resellers in the Southeast and parts of the Midwest can now have orders filled from one location, Schwab explained, instead of having to draw on the resources of two.

"We're going to have more availability," he said. "The key was, if we could present resellers with distribution centers that had everything they needed—if we could could fill their orders completely out of one distribution center and there are less invoices and less trying to time everything to show up at the site—it's basically an intrinsic benefit."

D&H estimates that some orders, due to the centralized Atlanta location, would see freight costs reduced by as much as 6 percent. If a reseller ordered six different items, Schwab said, they could now get all six out of Atlanta instead of having to, say, wait on two from Jacksonville and four from Dallas.

"When you look at what these customers will be pulling in from this new center, their ability to get product in one- to two-day increases," he said. "That inherently means less three- to four-day freight. They can be within the right zone and not pay a higher rate."

D&H's resellers and employees learned of the new warehouse on Monday. Calls to D&H resellers in the region were not immediately returned.

While one of the distributor's warehouse managers will be moving to Atlanta to run it, Schwab said D&H would probably cut ties with current D&H employees in Jacksonville and Dallas who opt not to make the move.

"We're trying to minimize the people that are leaving," he said. "We're transitioning and trying to maintain the current staff and put programs in place for them to earn extra money, a strong incentive program for existing employees. It's not the first time we've seen distribution centers being moved or consolidated. It's for the benefit of customers."

Schwab said it was hard to say how many current employees, if any, D&H expects to lose in the transition—data from previous warehouse consolidations wasn't necessarily indicative of what would happen this time around, he suggested.

But if in an ideal situation all employees could make the move, they would all, with the exception of a "few supervisory" positions, keep their jobs, he added.