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At Paramont EO, picking and packing orders is nearly a 24-hour operation executed with careful planning to reduce errors and confusion during delivery.

In April alone, there were 3,657 deliveries with 20,155 line items shipped out of the Woodridge location. Despite this high volume, Paramont warehouse staff were able to uphold their standard fill rate accuracy of 99.5 percent, and the top 1,500 items had a 98.7 percent in stock fill-rate.

Moving this many items takes a lot of effort and precise coordination by the warehouse staff.

In the warehouse, orders are picked and then double-checked for accuracy. The order tickets have quality stamps and include a “picked by” and a “checked by” line to ensure it has been looked over by two people. Then, the order tickets become the packing list.

Many items are repackaged by our staff to meet the customer’s quantity needs and then carefully labeled. We offer item-specific delivery, which can be by building floor or other pre-arranged quantities.

With many of Chicago’s construction projects taking place within existing buildings, the delivery process has to be carefully orchestrated to work around each building’s schedule. Logistics for a project at an existing building require a bit more pre-planning as the site typically has occupants. Since these buildings are not full construction sites, there is not a freight elevator the workers can use to bring materials to their work sites and access to the regular elevator is restricted. Deliveries must be made at specific times when the construction crews can use the elevator for freight, typically well before offices open for the day.

For these projects, the warehouse staff will often repackage materials and supplies for customers into custom packages to make them more manageable and able to fit in the existing elevators, since there is no large freight elevator or crane to bring materials to a work site in an existing building. This saves the construction workers time at the job site because the materials will arrive phased and staged in manageable pieces, which means workers don’t have to break the order down to make it fit where they need it to go and then figure out where all the pieces went. With our warehouse packing orders to fit each building, this helps keep all the components of an order together, saving the construction workers time at the job site.

To make deliveries easier for customers, warehouse workers place materials onto carts that can be rolled off the trucks and into the elevators.

Once items are packed for delivery and the number of pieces is determined, the shipping labels are generated. Shipping labels include the customer’s PO number, the Paramont order number and the number of pieces, broken into carton, skid or bundle.

Then orders are moved to the staging areas to be loaded onto the trucks. If there are 12 trucks making deliveries, there are 12 staging areas set up in the warehouse.

Trucks are packed in order of the route, with the last deliveries put in the back of the truck and the first in the front.

All the morning trucks are packed and ready by 8 p.m. the previous evening, and the drivers typically arrive at 4:30 a.m. to begin early-morning deliveries. Deliveries begin with the drivers checking their manifests, the materials on the truck and their route for the morning.

The early-morning delivery drivers typically return to the warehouse from their first runs by 9 a.m., so the warehouse personnel can repeat the picking, packing and loading process for orders that come in during the morning hours to have them ready to go out as second and third runs as soon as possible.

To have Paramont EO deliver supplies to your work site, please call 844-PARAMONT (844-7272666).