FOOD & BEVERAGE DISTRIBUTION
A nine-person distributor automates case packing in three weeks
9 days
INTAKE TO OFFER
5 → 1
CUSTOMER QUESTION ROUNDS
$19.4K
EXCLUSIONS PRICED EARLY
3 weeks
CONTRACT TO RUNNING
Challenge
A regional food distributor ran its entire outbound case-packing operation by hand: an operator scanned each item at a staging shelf, then hand-loaded it into one of eleven container types selected by the order. There was no conveyor, no PLC, and no CAD documentation of the space. The first integrator to engage sent a standard intake questionnaire requesting line drawings and fieldbus handshake details. The customer's reply was one sentence: they were a small company, and they had none of it.
Approach
Polyborg reclassified the deal as a standalone, non-integrated cell for an operator with no in-house engineering function, which immediately masked eleven inapplicable questions: the CAD and fieldbus fields were not unanswered, they were not applicable. Spatial capture was done by walking the staging area with a phone: video plus a LIDAR scan produced the workspace envelope, shelf geometry, and container dimensions, each field carrying its source frame. A single consolidated question round resolved the remaining unknowns. The request package that went to integrators opened with operating context (fully manual station, staffing across two shifts) before any data table, and it was reorganized section by section against the integrator's own question list.
Outcome
- One round of customer questions instead of five
- 9 days from intake to a costed, financeable offer
- $19,400 of exclusions (shipping, product and case nests, and installation & startup) identified and priced before the package reached the financing partner
- Engineering quoted at $36,925 was benchmarked to a $25–28K band for a static-pick nest cell with no vision guidance, and renegotiated
- Cell commissioned and running 3 weeks after contract
“The package they sent me was more elaborate than anything I get from a customer directly. I quoted it in two days instead of two weeks.”
Principal, regional system integrator