McLane designs custom ERP and WMS for a nationwide distributor

Enterprise scale that off-the-shelf can't fit

McLane is one of the largest distributors in the United States, moving product to convenience stores, club stores, and the grocery and food-service world across dozens of distribution centers. At that scale, the software that runs the business is the business, and there is no off-the-shelf system that handles it out of the box.

This was the largest enterprise we've worked with, and it sits at the far end of a range that also includes startups and solo founders. What made us the right fit wasn't just that we could build software. It was more than a decade of supply-chain experience: ERP, warehouse management, order management, transportation, and the messy work of making all of those systems talk to each other.

We designed and built significant parts of McLane's custom ERP and WMS, from requirements and architecture through real code.

Building for the details that break other systems

Tracking what most systems get wrong

McLane's inventory carries requirements that generic systems tend to ignore. Cigarettes come with tax stamps and age and tax rules that have to be tracked precisely. Perishable food comes with expiration and spoilage, and their old system didn't track expiration accurately, which is a serious problem for anyone distributing perishables at scale. We built modules that handle these cases directly, so compliance and freshness are tracked instead of hoped for.

One platform, many business units

McLane runs as multiple business units that share resources but operate independently. We built an architecture flexible enough to give each unit its own autonomy while still drawing on shared services, with the enterprise-grade permissioning, authentication, business intelligence, and data integrations a company this size depends on.

Systems that live in the physical world

The hard part of supply-chain software is that it doesn't just push data around. It reaches into the physical world of conveyors, control systems, and a product landscape with real edge cases, and it only works if the people on the floor actually adopt it. Designing systems that meet those requirements, keep up as the requirements change, and hold together across a complex ecosystem is exactly the kind of problem our supply-chain background was built for.