Scaling Warehouse Operations in Business Central Without Increasing Headcount

Ryan: Okay, I want you to picture a warehouse in December. It’s Canada. It is freezing cold. It’s the absolute peak of the holiday rise.

Emma: Oh yeah, the worst time of year for logistics, right?

Ryan: Exactly. So the year is 2023. Looking at a company called TDL GenTech. They’re a massive technology distributor, and in that one month, they process 4,500 shipments,

Emma: which, I mean, to be fair, that’s a solid number for a distributor of their size. Moving four and a half thousand orders in a single month. It’s respectable. It’s a very busy month.

Ryan: Yeah, it’s busy, but it’s manageable. Right now I want you to Fast forward exactly two years. December 2025, same warehouse footprint, same company. But this time, in that same 30 day window, they processed 23,000 shipments.

Emma: That is, I mean, that’s nearly a 500% increase. It’s a five fold jump in volume.

Ryan: It is, but here’s the data point that actually made me stop and reread report I read three times to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. Yeah, they handled that 5x surge in volume, adding nearly 20,000 extra shipments without increasing their seasonal headcount. Yeah. In fact, Lance Tanner, who is their VP of operations, he confirmed they actually used fewer people in 2025 than they did in 2020 23.

Emma: See, that is the part that technically speaking, shouldn’t be possible.

Ryan: Right.

Emma: Usually in supply chain economics, volume and labor cost are completely linear. You know, if volume goes up five times, you hire five times the people or you pay five times the overtime. Breaking that link, that is the holy grail of operations right there.

Ryan: Exactly. And that is the mystery we’re solving on this deep dive today. How does a legacy Canadian distributor pull this off? While navigating not one, but two major company acquisitions at the exact same time,

Emma: which, let’s be honest, usually results in a nervous breakdown, not record profits.

Ryan: Yeah, totally.

Emma: Acquisitions are messy. ERP implementations are messy. Doing both simultaneously is usually just a recipe for disaster.

Ryan: So to find the blueprint, we analyzed a panel discussion featuring that VP of Ops, Lance Tenair, plus the, well, I’d call it a Czech dream team they assembled. They had partners from lid, Insight Works and True Commerce. And our mission today is to uncover this specific architecture they built.

Emma: And the goal here isn’t just to, you know, list off software names. We need to uncover the mindset because you don’t scale 5x just by working harder or buying a faster computer. You have to fundamentally change the physics of how your business moves boxes.

Ryan: Absolutely. So let’s set the scene a little bit. Who exactly is tdl? Gentech.

Emma: So they are a wholesale distributor based near Trenton, Ontario. Think of them as the invisible backbone for a lot of the tech gear you see in Canada.

Ryan: Like what kind of gear they deal

Emma: in V. IP systems, broadband networking, surveillance cameras, consumer electronics. They work with over 250 brands.

Ryan: Okay, so high complexity, lots of SKUs, lots of different shapes and sizes of boxes floating around.

Emma: Massive complexity. And back in early 2022, under new ownership, they hit a hard wall. They were running on this legacy ERP system.

Ryan: Let’s pause and define that. Second, just so everyone listening is on the same page.

Emma: Erp Enterprise Resource Planning.

Ryan: Right.

Emma: Think of it as the central nervous system of a company. It tracks every dollar, every product, every customer, every single invoice. If the ERP is slow, the whole company is slow.

Ryan: And TDL system was essentially a dinosaur at this point.

Emma: Yeah, Lance actually mentioned they could maybe squeeze out a few hundred more orders a year on it, but beyond that, the system would just completely choke.

Ryan: So in July 2022, they decide to perform open heart surgery. They start an implementation of MIC Business Central to replace the old dinosaur. But then things get incredibly messy.

Emma: Ah, yes, the hairball scenario.

Ryan: The hairball. Just as they start this massive software migration, they acquire another company called Gentech.

Emma: And this is where most consultants would look at you and tell you to stop.

Ryan: Just hit the brakes.

Emma: Exactly. And ERP migration streams every single department. Accounting has to learn new codes, sales has to learn new screens, the warehouse has to learn new scanners.

Ryan: It’s exhausting. It is.

Emma: And merging with another company does the exact same thing to your staff. So doing both simultaneously is incredibly risky. You are effectively trying to transplant a brain while grafting on a new arm at the exact same time.

Ryan: That is a terrifying image, honestly, but very accurate. So how did they not just collapse under the weight of that? Lance Tenna mentioned a very specific strategy here.

Emma: They prioritized stability over speed. Initially, Lance’s strategy was to implement the new ERP for a TDL first.

Ryan: Stabilize the patient, get their own house in order.

Emma: Right. Get the core business running smoothly on the new brain. Only then did they bring the acquired

Ryan: company into the fold, which seems so obvious in hindsight, but I imagine the pressure from ownership to just merge everything now and realize those synergies must have been incredibly high.

Emma: Oh, it always is. Executives want immediate roi. But that patience allowed them to build a really modular foundation. And they desperately needed that foundation. Because TDL isn’t just moving pallets to other businesses. They do something that is notoriously difficult to automate.

Ryan: Dropshipping.

Emma: Exactly.

Ryan: Dropshipping. Okay, we hear this term a lot in, you know, e commerce side hustles on YouTube. But what does it mean at an enterprise scale for a massive distributor like tdl?

Emma: It means TDL is invisible. Let’s say you, the listener, go to a major retailer’s website, let’s say Vespuy or Amazon, and you buy a webcam. Okay, you pay the retailer, but the retailer doesn’t actually have that webcam in their warehouse. The order digitally flushes through to TDL’s warehouse. TDL picks it, packs it, and slaps a label on it.

Ryan: And the label says, from Best Buy, right?

Emma: Correct. The customer never knows TDL even exists. But the logistical burden is entirely on TDL’s shoulders. Instead of shipping one giant pallet of 500 webcams to a store distribution center, they are shipping 500 individual boxes to 500 different houses with 500 different custom labels. It transforms a wholesale business into a direct to consumer business practically overnight.

Ryan: That sounds like an operational nightmare. And that actually brings us to part two of our story. The hands of the operation Business Central, that new ERP they bought, it’s great at accounting, but does it actually know how to run a physical warehouse floor efficiently?

Emma: Not really. Business central is the brain. It knows the numbers, it knows you sold a webcam, but it lacks hands. It doesn’t inherently know how to optimize a picker’s walking route through the aisles or how to handle complex carrier shipping rates for residential delivery. For that, TDL partnered with lid their implementation experts, who brought in a specific tool set from a company called insightworks.

Ryan: I really wanted to drill down on this because the tech here is cool. In a very practical boots on the ground way, they implemented a few apps like warehouse Insights, which puts those handheld scanners in the workers hands and dynamic ship for the labels. But the one they kept marveling at on the panel was something called the order fulfillment worksheet.

Emma: Yes, the worksheet.

Ryan: That worksheet sounds kind of boring. It sounds like a dusty Excel spreadsheet. But based on the discussion, this seems to be the pivot point for their entire operation.

Emma: It absolutely is. It is the most critical piece of the puzzle. You can think of it as the conductor of the orchestra.

Ryan: Why? What does it actually do that a human warehouse manager can’t do well.

Emma: Think about the chaos of 23,000 orders. You have orders flooding in from Amazon, from Best Buy, from small independent dealers. Some are rush delivery, some are standard grounds. Some are going to Vancouver, some are going to Halifax.

Ryan: Just a constant fire hose of demands.

Emma: Exactly. And some orders are complete, while others are waiting on out of stock items. In a manual warehouse, a human manager, usually a very stressed out one, has to look at a massive stack of paper or a spreadsheet and decide, okay, Bob, you, you go pick these 10 orders. Sarah, you grab these five, which is incredibly slow.

Ryan: And humans just make bad decisions when they’re tired or overwhelmed.

Emma: They do. The order fulfillment worksheet automates that entire logic layer. It acts like an air traffic controller.

Ryan: Okay?

Emma: It looks at the inventory, it looks at the carrier cutoff. It’s like it knows UPS leaves at 4pm so we need to pick these specific boxes first. It looks at priority levels and it essentially groups the work for the warehouse team automatically. It says, here is a batch of 50 orders that can all be picked in aisle four right now.

Ryan: So it literally takes the thinking out of the picking process.

Emma: It takes the administrative thinking out. Yes. The picker doesn’t have to strategize their route. They just look at their scanner and it tells them what to do. Go to bin A12, pick three units. Now go to bin A14, pick one unit. It turns a chaotic scavenger hunt into a highly structured process.

Ryan: Oh, but. And this is a massive caveat that Mark Hamblin from InsightWorks emphasized during the panel. This entire beautiful automated system only works if you have something he called inventory accuracy.

Emma: Right. Garbage in, garbage out. Or in this case, high speed garbage out.

Ryan: Explain that. Why does a wrong number in the system break the robot, so to speak?

Emma: Well, imagine the worksheet releases 15 orders for webcams because the system thinks you have 50 on the shelf, but you really only have 48 because two were stolen or broken last week and nobody bothered to record it.

Ryan: Oh, I see where this is going.

Emma: You now have a major problem. The system sends a picker to the shelf. The picker arrives, the shelf is empty. Now that picker has to stop what they’re doing, go find a manager, adjust the inventory in the computer, and figure out what to do with the order they can’t fulfill.

Ryan: And suddenly your slick automation has turned into a manual, time consuming investigation.

Emma: Exactly. The flow just completely stops. That’s why Mark emphasized that the handheld scanners aren’t just about speed. They are about enforcing truth.

Ryan: Enforcing truth. I Like that.

Emma: You cannot automate what you cannot measure. The scanners force the warehouse staff to record every single movement in real time. So the brain, Business Central, always knows exactly what the hands are holding.

Ryan: Okay, so they have the brain and the hands working together. They’ve stabilized tdl. Now we get to the real stress test. Part three, the Microcell miracle.

Emma: Yes, this is where the story shifts from just good management to something basically unheard of.

Ryan: It’s July 2024. TDL acquires another company, Microcell. Now, Microcell wasn’t on Business Central. They were using NetSuite. Totally different language, totally different architecture.

Emma: And usually moving a company from NetSuite to Business Central is a massive, painful project. We’re talking six months minimum. You have to map data fields, you have to retrain all the users, you have to test all the custom workflows. It is a nightmare of compatibility.

Ryan: TDL did it in less than a

Emma: week, which is effectively instantaneous in ERP terms. It’s crazy.

Ryan: LAN said. From the day they signed the acquisition deal to the moment they were shipping microcell inventory out of TDL’s system. Less than 7 days. How is that even physically possible?

Emma: It really validates the platform approach they took because TDL has spent the previous two years building this robust machine. The BC foundation, the Insight Works, scanning the strict processes. They didn’t have to reinvent the wheel for microce. They just had to plug them in.

Ryan: So instead of building a whole new factory, they just put a new product on the existing conveyor belt.

Emma: That’s a perfect analogy. They knew exactly how to ingest the data. They knew exactly how the scanners would handle the new SKUs. If they were still on their old legacy system, this acquisition would have stalled operations for months.

Ryan: Yeah, they’d be stuck.

Emma: They would have had to run two separate systems side by side, which is hugely inefficient and expensive.

Ryan: So the pipes were laid and the water just flowed. But there was a blockage coming. And this brings us to part four, the data layer. Because microcell didn’t just come with inventory, they came with clients.

Emma: Huge, demanding dropship clients. And this is where we have to talk about edi.

Ryan: Electronic Data Interchange.

Emma: Right, the rosetta stone for supply chains. It’s the standard digital format that allows a retailer’s computer, like Walmart’s or Best Buys, to talk directly to a distributor’s computer without a human involved.

Ryan: So here is the situation they found themselves in. TdL closes the Microcell deal in late summer. They suddenly realize they have to be ready to process Microcell’s massive dropship volume

Emma: by November 1st, which is the absolute start of the holiday peak season.

Ryan: And if they miss that date, catastrophe

Emma: because of something called the blackout or the code freeze.

Ryan: I found this fascinating. Can you explain the blackout to everyone?

Emma: Sure. So major retail partners and the networks that manage them, like Commerce Hub, which is now called Rhythm, they have strict non negotiable rules for the holidays. Starting in November, they lock the doors. No changes allowed, zero system changes allowed, no new integrations. They do this to ensure stability during the Christmas rush, so no one accidentally breaks the website with a bad line of code. If you aren’t fully integrated and tested by November 1st, you are locked out until January.

Ryan: So if TDL missed that window, they couldn’t use the automated system for all those new microcell orders. They would be stuck doing it the old way through the whole holiday season.

Emma: And the old way was a horror story. Lance shared a stat during the panel that actually made me wince. In August 2024, right before this integration, 80% of their orders were being manually entered.

Ryan: What does manually entered actually look like in 2024? Are we talking copy paste?

Emma: It’s worse than copy paste. Lance described humans looking at one screen, say a web portal from a retailer, and literally typing the details manually into their own finance system. And he gave this example that just hurts to think about. Typing tax amounts.

Ryan: Oh, wow, just raw data entry.

Emma: Imagine sitting there looking at a line item for tax on a screen. $4.32. You have to physically type $4.32 into the other screen, then move to the next line, then the customer’s address.

Ryan: That sounds like a guaranteed recipe for errors.

Emma: Oh, it is. You accidentally type a 7 instead of a 9 on a tax line. The invoice fails, the payment is delayed. Now multiply that tiny risk by 20,000 orders in a heavily compressed holiday window.

Ryan: Lance said if they had missed the November 1 deadline, the cost would have been double or triple because they would have needed to hire an absolute army of temp workers just to sit there and type.

Emma: Assuming they could even find the people, which is hard enough in December. That’s why they brought in TrueCommerce for the EDI piece. They needed to automate that translation layer immediately.

Ryan: So the goal was order comes in from Amazon, TrueCommerce translates it instantly, Business Central catches it, the worksheet organizes it, and the picker scans it. No typing anywhere.

Emma: A completely touchless supply chain from a data perspective. And the result speaks for itself. By the end of 2025, that manual entry rate dropped from 80% down to 12%.

Ryan: That 12% is probably just the weird stuff, right? Like bad addresses or custom requests.

Emma: Exactly. Exceptions. The standard flow became invisible. And that right there is how they handled 23,000 shipments with fewer people. The computers were doing the typing and the humans were just moving the goods.

Ryan: You know, throughout this whole discussion, we keep talking about the software business Central InsightWorks, True Commerce. But Jason Chance from LID, the implementation partner, he made a comment that I really need to highlight. He said the partner you pair with is almost more important than the software.

Emma: It sounds like a consultant’s sales pitch, but he’s right. You can buy the best tennis racket in the world, but if you don’t know how to swing it, you’re not winning Wimbledon. You can buy the most expensive ERP on the market, but if you configure it wrong, it’s just expensive shelfware.

Ryan: And this brings us to part five, the human element. It seems like the real secret sauce here wasn’t just the code they wrote, but the accountability of the people involved.

Emma: It was a four legged stool. You had TDL is the client, Lyd is the integrator, InsightWorks providing the warehouse apps, and TrueCommerce handling the EDI. If any one of them missed a deadline, that November 1 blackout would have crushed the whole operation.

Ryan: Lance mentioned that everyone held their dates, which, you know, sounds pretty basic, do your job on time. But in massive corporate IT projects, isn’t that actually pretty rare?

Emma: It is incredibly rare. Projects usually drift, scope, creep happens, deadlines slide. But I think a lot of the credit here also has to go to TDL’s internal culture. Lance’s been there for 17 years.

Ryan: That institutional knowledge seems crucial.

Emma: It’s everything. As we said earlier, you can’t automate a process you don’t understand. TDL didn’t just hand the keys to the consultants and say, here, fix our business. They said, here’s exactly how we work. Here are the edge cases, here are the exceptions, and here is exactly what needs to happen.

Ryan: So TDL owned the business process and the partners just built the specific tools

Emma: to match it exactly. If TDL had been disorganized or didn’t actually know their own workflows, LID and TrueCommerce would have been guessing. And guessing takes time they simply didn’t have.

Ryan: It’s so interesting looking at the timeline of all this, they spent nearly two years getting the base TDL system right before they tried to ingest microcell they really didn’t rush that foundation.

Emma: That’s the big lesson here. Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. By taking the time to build the engine correctly, they were able to race the car later.

Ryan: So let’s bring this all together. We started with a company facing a real scalability crisis. They were doing 4,500 shipments, drowning in manual data entry and trying to absorb new companies on the fly.

Emma: And they moved to a state where they are processing 23,000 shipments, a 400% increase with 12% manual entry and zero additional headcount.

Ryan: It really is a masterclass in modernization. And what strikes me the most is what we didn’t talk about today. We didn’t talk about generative AI taking over decision making. We didn’t talk about humanoid robots replacing warehouse pickers. We spent this whole time talking about boring backend plumbing, ERP WMSedi.

Emma: It’s not flashy, is it? But it’s the actual backbone of profitability. In a world where everyone is obsessed with the latest AI hype and looking for magic buttons, TDL proved that the biggest competitive advantage might just be getting your systems to talk to each other properly.

Ryan: That’s a really powerful takeaway. The boring stuff is what actually pays the bills.

Emma: It’s what lets you scale. You can’t scale chaos. TDL organized the chaos first, and then they scaled it.

Ryan: So here’s the question for you listening right now. We know TDL save double or triple the cost by hitting that deadline and automating their flow. When you look at your own organization, whether you’re in supply chain or finance or marketing, where are you throwing bodies at a problem that should really be solved by architecture?

Emma: And you have to ask yourself, what is the cost of doing nothing? TDL knew that doing nothing meant they couldn’t acquire microcell. It meant they couldn’t grow. They would have stagnated. Sometimes the riskiest move you can make is just standing still and hoping the old way keeps working.

Ryan: Absolutely. Automation isn’t just about removing people from the equation. It’s about freeing them up to do work that actually matters, rather than sitting there typing tax codes all day. Something to chew on next time you see a massive spreadsheet being manually updated in your office. Thanks for diving deep with us today.

Emma: Always a pleasure.

Ryan: We’ll see you on the next one.