A study of a third party logistic provider that has continuously redesigned theirs warehouse operations in order to meet an extremely volatile market with very short delivery times and large order size fluctuation. This research was done as a longitudinal study from 1993 to 2010, where the company was followed on daily base 1993-2000 and for the last 10 years on yearly base.

The paper explain how an unique combination of many different picking methods, flexible layout and an intelligent warehouse management system, have founded a major increase of the providers market share from 22 to 50 %.

Many similar companies have tried to meet the marked demand with warehouse automation, this case show the importance to avoid automation to keep maximum flexibility to be able to meet extreme volume variation with very short delivery times. Instead investments are turned into intelligence of the IT-system which support different fulfillment processes.