From Fragmented Systems to One View: A 3PL in Ontario

Client profile

The client is a third-party logistics provider operating three regional warehouses in Ontario, serving e-commerce and B2B clients. Combined capacity is roughly 180,000 square feet. The business has grown quickly; peak seasons put significant pressure on receiving, putaway, and shipping. The leadership team needs visibility into utilization, throughput, and order accuracy both for daily operations and for decisions about expansion, consolidation, or new automation.

Challenges before Proforma Studio

Operations ran on a mix of legacy systems and spreadsheets. Inventory and order flows were tracked in different tools per site, with no single view across the three warehouses. Receiving and outbound shipping were largely manual from a planning perspective; cross-dock opportunities were identified by experience rather than data. There was no real-time dashboard for utilization, pick/pack accuracy, or cycle times, so problems were often spotted only after client complaints or month-end reconciliation. When leadership considered adding capacity or consolidating a facility, they had to pull data from multiple sources and reconcile formats. The disconnect between warehouse operations and the company's real estate and facility footprint made it hard to tie logistics performance to asset-level decisions.

Why they chose Proforma Studio

The company wanted a warehouse management layer that could map storage locations and capacities, track inbound and outbound flows, and surface KPIs—utilization, throughput, order accuracy, SLA performance—in dashboards. They also wanted those KPIs to connect to portfolio and asset views so that logistics performance could inform real estate and facility decisions (e.g. where to expand, which site to automate first). Proforma Studio's Warehouse module offered location and capacity mapping, inbound/outbound and cross-dock tracking, and dashboards aligned to these metrics, with the ability to integrate warehouse data into the same platform's portfolio and facility modules. The Canadian context (currency, date format, provincial considerations) was relevant for reporting and for future integration with facility compliance.

Implementation

The team implemented Proforma Studio's Warehouse module across all three sites. They defined storage zones and capacities in the system and began recording inbound receipts, putaway, and outbound orders. Cross-dock flows were modeled so that high-velocity SKUs could be identified and routed accordingly. Dashboards were configured for key metrics: utilization by location and overall, throughput (orders and units per day), order accuracy (picks and shipments), and SLA performance against client commitments. Alerts were set for utilization thresholds and accuracy drops. Warehouse leads use the same platform for daily huddles and for weekly reports to leadership. The same deal/property structure in Proforma Studio was used to represent each warehouse as an asset, so that operational KPIs could be viewed alongside facility and financial data. When evaluating expansion or consolidation, the team now pulls utilization and throughput trends directly from the platform.

Outcomes

Within five months, order accuracy (picks and shipments) improved from about 96% to 99.2%, reducing returns and client disputes. Throughput—units processed per day across the three sites—increased by 28% without adding headcount, as better visibility into bottlenecks and cross-dock flows allowed the team to reallocate labor and streamline processes. Peak-season handling improved: the team was able to plan capacity and staffing using historical throughput and utilization data from the platform. On the strategic side, leadership used warehouse KPIs in portfolio views to justify a decision to expand one facility and to defer automation at another until utilization justified the investment. The operations manager reported that having one system for locations, flows, and dashboards reduced the time spent on manual reconciliation and gave them confidence in the numbers they shared with clients and executives.

Client quote

“We used to run each warehouse on its own spreadsheets and legacy tools. Now we have one system for locations, receiving, and shipping, with clear dashboards on utilization and accuracy. Our error rate dropped and our throughput went up. When we looked at expanding, we had the data in the same place as our real estate view—that made the decision much clearer.”